Their Darkest Hour

by Christopher Nuttall

  The thought was a chilling one. Hundreds of thousands of people had worked for the British Government. Many would have been killed in the fighting or the chaos that had gripped parts of the city, but many more would have survived – and grown hungry. The aliens were offering them food and drink and Robin couldn't blame many of them for agreeing to serve the aliens in any way. Their families would have starved otherwise. The thought kept mocking him. His wife might starve if he refused to serve the aliens. And yet...where did collaboration end?

  There were thirty policemen in the building with orders to keep order – and use whatever force was necessary to remove trouble-makers. The aliens had converted London’s stadiums into makeshift detention camps and – according to rumour – they’d established much larger holding centres outside the cities. Anyone who caused trouble was to be removed to the detention camps and no one knew what would happen to them afterwards. The aliens had caused so much damage to London that Robin suspected that one of the jobs assigned to prisoners would be clearing up the debris and clearing blocked roadways of ruined cars.

  The policemen were unarmed. Robin cursed the Home Office under his breath, even as he silently remembered the weapons they’d hidden in the city. The aliens had insisted that all weapons be surrendered – and they’d had the records to see how many weapons were unaccounted for. Robin was privately astonished that they’d accepted that several hundred pistols and rifles could go missing – or be reported destroyed – and it made him wonder if the aliens had already penetrated his little cell. Maybe they were only waiting for the policemen to be surplus to requirements before they dropped a hammer on their heads.

  He felt dirty as the bell finally rang and they opened the doors. The aliens had been broadcasting the same message for days – using their so-called Prime Minister Beresford as the speaker – ordering all of London's residents to present themselves for registration. Anyone who failed to register within the week, they’d warned the public, would be arrested when they failed to produce a registration card and face indefinite detention. In truth, Robin had no idea just what the aliens intended to do with humanity in the long-term. Slavery seemed unlikely for a race that could cross the interstellar gulfs of space. But unless there was a hope of victory, he didn't dare start to fight back.

  “Form lines,” he ordered, silently praying that no one would start anything. Many of the people waiting outside looked desperate. They would be hungry; London’s shops had been looted and there hadn't been much of anything brought in from outside the city. “Remain calm and form lines – you will all be dealt with in time.”

  Some of the citizens were staring at the policemen with sullen, angry faces. Others seemed too nervous to care, or were perhaps even relieved that they were dealing with human police, rather than aliens. Some probably didn't even believe in the aliens. The internet – what was left of it – had included a conspiracy theory that suggested that there had really been a military coup and the whole story of aliens was intended to keep the British public quiet while the Generals took over. Robin might have been tempted to believe the story if he hadn't seen the aliens. They were chillingly real.

  The lines snaked towards the civil servants, who started processing the citizens with bland indifference. They’d been told to bring ID – driving licences or passports – which suggested to Robin that the aliens had managed to capture almost all of the government’s records. There would be no chance for anyone to change their name and identity in the chaos, not if the aliens – and their collaborators – had anything to say about it. Robin silently prayed that everything would go perfectly, without him and his men having to intervene. God alone knew how the aliens would react if they had to run the city on their own. They could simply leave the civilian population to starve...

  “Here,” one oversized man bellowed, suddenly. “How am I supposed to eat this, you dozy cow?”

  Robin started towards him, one hand dropping to the truncheon at his belt. The man was staring at a package of food from the piles behind the tables, food produced by the aliens. Robin had had a taste and wondered if anyone could actually be induced to like the stuff – it tasted faintly of leather, at best. The aliens insisted that the semi-bread was good to feed a family for four for several days, but Robin knew better. If nothing else, eating the same bland food for more than a few days would be severely demoralising.

  “You cut it up and you put it in your mouth,” the civil servant repeated in the same bored tone. She’d been working for the Department of Transportation before the aliens had arrived, just another pen-pusher in a department that had more pen-pushers than it had drivers or engineers. “It’s perfectly simple...”

  “It’s muck,” the man proclaimed, loudly. There was a murmur of agreement from several in the crowd. The lines were starting to jostle. “I can't feed my family on this shit!”

  Robin caught his arm. “That’s enough, sir,” he said, trying to project a mixture of stern warning and the promise of excessive violence into his voice. They’d been told that appearing confident and unmoveable would prevent people from trying to pick fights with the police. Personally, Robin would have preferred a year of hard labour for each yob who thought he could get away with chucking a beer bottle at a hard-working policeman. “The lady’s just doing her job...”

  The man swung around and threw a punch at Robin, who jumped back automatically, whipping out his truncheon. A lady – a sad, beating-looking mother of two kids – tried to hold her husband back, but he shrugged off her arm and came after Robin. Robin didn't hesitated; he carefully lashed out with his truncheon, hitting the man in the chest. He folded over and hit the floor with a terrific crash. It would have been a media circus in the old days, with reports of police brutality hitting the airwaves faster than light, but now...he shivered as he realised that they could get away with almost anything, as long as they obeyed the aliens. The thought was terrifying. He knew dozens of coppers who would have liked to take the gloves off and just teach young hooligans some respect the hard way. What would they do without restraints?

  He pushed the thought aside as he used a plastic tie to secure the man and then dragged him into a corner. “Don’t worry about him,” he said, to his wife. She was on the verge of either crying or lashing out at him herself. He couldn't really blame her for either. “I’ll try to see to it that he gets back home ok.”

  The lines moved quicker now that the police had shown that they were ready to deal with any challenge. It didn't get any easier. Crying children constantly drowned out every other sound, despite the frantic attempts by their parents to calm them down. Older children looked around, bemused by what they were seeing, while their parents were clearly terrified. Robin understood just how they were feeling. The world – the world they’d grown up in – was no more. All of the old certainties were gone.

  He caught sight of a dozen different ethnic groups and winced inwardly. Indians and Pakistanis, Arabs and Jamaicans...some from communities that had a long history of confrontation with the police. He had to wade in to stop a Pakistani man from attacking one of the civil servants, apparently outraged because he’d been told that his wife had to remove her veil. The mood in the building rapidly turned ugly, but he resisted the urge to call for backup. An alien patrol with live weapons would arrive and probably shoot a few dozen innocent citizens to restore order. That was the last thing he wanted.

  Another scuffle caught his eye, one that seemed to spring out of nowhere – and then he saw the ID card. It was a military ID, one that identified its bearer as a serving member of the Royal Navy. He didn't want to act, but there was no choice. The policemen closed in rapidly and led the sailor away, leaving his wife behind. They’d been given no choice in the matter – all serving members of the military, whatever the service, were to be arrested and handed over to the aliens. He told himself that the sailor would have a chance to escape – they’d carefully not secured the holding area they’d made in one of the classrooms – but it was
small comfort. The eyes of the sailor’s wife and baby child would haunt his nightmares for the rest of time.

  Dear God, he prayed, silently. Please let this be over soon.

  He ran through the figures in his head. The population of Greater London was estimated at around eight million. Some would have died in the fighting, or in the chaos, or...maybe of simple starvation. The remainder were all expected to register within the week, or face arrest. How long would it take to register eight million people? It could take weeks, or even months.

  Silently, he damned himself. But what else could he do?

  ***

  Doctor Fatima Hasid had never liked crowded rooms, even as a child. She’d skipped classes at the mosque because there were too many girls crammed into the small room put aside for women – the boys had a far larger room, and a better teacher – and she’d stopped going to them shortly after she entered secondary school. The NHS had had its fair share of crowded rooms, but as a doctor she’d been able to avoid them and see patients one by one. Entering the registry office was a foretaste of hell.

  The lines seemed never-ending and she was silently relieved that she’d managed to convince her superiors to give her the afternoon off. London still had thousands of wounded on its hands, but they’d finally managed to get the worst of the wounded into proper hospitals – even if they had had to distribute them over Britain. The remainder, the ones who hadn't been seriously injured, had had to be sent home. It had broken her heart to do it, but there’d been no choice. Their supplies had dropped to dangerously low levels.

  Ahead of her, some boys were pushing and shoving. She hated to think what it was going to be like when her stepmother and her overweight sons and their relatives came to register themselves. Some of them were talking about refusing to register – after all, they’d had as little to do with the British Government as possible, except when it came to claiming benefits. Fatima suspected that if they tried to defy the aliens – the aliens they didn't really believe in – they’d find that the aliens hammered them into the ground. The stories she’d heard from some of her patients were horrific.

  She pulled her arms around herself as the queue kept inching forward, finally allowing her to catch sight of a desk. It was no surprise to see a human – a set of humans – standing behind it, trying to handle the paperwork. The aliens wouldn't have wanted to waste their manpower on such a piddling task. Whatever the claims that they were all-powerful – the radio had certainly been assuring the British population that resistance was futile – there had to be limits on their manpower. Alien-power? She was still mulling that over when she finally reached the desk and sat down in front of the civil servant.

  “Name, address, proof of identity...”

  The words rattled out and Fatima did her best to answer. It seemed that no one else from her family had registered yet, which was hardly a surprise. The amount of data the aliens were collecting puzzled her for a long moment, before she realised that they probably had sophisticated computers capable of mining through the vast datafiles and drawing conclusions in a way that no human could match. It struck her that they were experienced at invading and occupying planets – and if that was the case, who else had they fought? There had always been stories of UFOs flying around and kidnapping people, flown by little grey men with anal fixations. Maybe they were real after all...

  “You’re a doctor,” the civil servant said. “You’re in one of the protected categories.”

  Fatima frowned, leaning forward. “Protected categories?”

  “They’re looking for people with certain skills,” the civil servant admitted. “Doctors and nurses...they’re needed right where they are, so they probably won’t send for you and put you to work somewhere else. Others...they’re not so lucky. The men who register today who aren’t in a protected category will probably find themselves ordered to do brute labour in a week’s time.”

  “I see,” Fatima said. “And you know this...how?”

  “I don't,” the civil servant said, “but I think it’s a reasonable guess, don’t you?”

  Fatima couldn't disagree. A machine on the desk buzzed and whirred, and finally discharged an ID card. Fatima studied it, trying to keep her consternation off her face. She hadn't even noticed the camera, but there was a picture of her on the front of the card. It seemed that there were limits to alien technology after all, part of her mind noted. Every photograph she’d had taken for official purposes had managed to make her look bad, mad, dead or some combination of the three. The alien technology was no better.

  “Carry it with you at all times,” the civil servant warned. “There’s a hefty fine if you lose it – and failing to produce it on demand could mean arrest, or worse. I don’t think they have lawyers telling them what they can and cannot do to prisoners...”

  Fatima thanked him and left. Outside, night was already starting to fall and so she hurried home. A curfew had been declared and there were already terrible rumours about what happened to those caught outside by the aliens. And her stepmother would bitch and moan if she was home late. They were supposed to be hosting guests soon and she was required to help. She would almost sooner have faced the aliens.

  ***

  Alan Beresford stood in an office that had once belonged to a banking CEO and stared out over London. The city was finally coming back to life at nights, even though the curfew meant that many who would once have been outside partying would be tucked up safe at home, doubtless wondering when their world would shatter around them once again. It was his world now...well, his and a few aliens, but it seemed they didn't care about the perks he claimed for himself as long as he did a good job. And he had done a good job. It had been his idea to put the civil servants back to work, along with the men who ran the electricity and water companies. London was coming back to life – and so was the rest of the country.

  The aliens were ruthlessly pragmatic, but they clearly didn't have the manpower to govern all of Britain, let alone the world. Alan was still unsure of what they actually wanted in the long run, but he was confident that he would be able to find a way to be useful to them. And he had his own long-term plans. He’d put friends and cronies in positions of power all over the country, laying a network that could be used in his own interests as well as those of his masters. It helped that the Prime Minister appeared to have vanished somewhere in the chaos of the first few days. Apart from a single message which was proving alarmingly persistent on the internet, no one had heard anything from him. It was quite possible that he was dead.

  Losing Prince Harry was equally annoying. Harry was King now that his father and brother were both dead. Alan doubted that the population of Britain would rise in outrage at losing their King, but Harry could have made an excellent figurehead for a new Britain. Or perhaps not. He’d been a soldier and would probably have old-fashioned ideas about loyalty and honour and service to his country running through his veins.

  Foolish, Alan told himself, and smiled. Loyalty and honour meant nothing these days – and they’d meant little before the aliens arrived. All that mattered was what one did for one’s own self – and if it meant stamping on a few toes...well, you couldn't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

  He lifted his glass – an expensive wine, but it had been easy to obtain in starving London – and drank a silent toast. To power, he told himself...and to those bold enough to seize it.

  Chapter Fifteen

  North England

  United Kingdom, Day 8

  Haddon Hall was one of the original stately England manors, built before the English Civil War by a loyalist who had lost his life fighting for Good King Charles. It was a regal building, although hopelessly impractical for military purposes, surrounded by gardens that regularly won awards in regional and national contests. Some people would have found it a paradise, a chance to play at being an English aristocrat. Gabriel Burley found it maddening. It was a prison by any other name, a place where he could do anything – except
leave. The handful of security staff – really soldiers wearing civilian clothes – were polite and friendly, but they wouldn’t let him leave. He was too important to risk falling into enemy hands.

  The thought made him snort in disgust as he paced the massive library. Two years ago, he’d been a junior MP with ideals, ideals that were being worn down by contact with real-life politics. How could he hope to achieve anything without compromise – and by compromising, he was steadily turning into a true politician, a man who compromised everything for the sake of power and position. A man like Alan Beresford.

  He snorted again as he picked up a book, glanced at it and put it down again. His host had given him the run of the house, and the use of an extensive collection of books, DVDs and even old-fashioned records, but it was still a prison. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, apart from his feelings of hopelessness. His position as Prime Minister was meaningless, save in name only. The invasion that gripped the country proved that, whatever he told himself; he could hardly command the aliens to leave, could he? Their forces held the entire country now, surrounding cities and trapping the civilian population within their homes. God alone knew what they would do when the resistance went to work. They’d certainly shown no sign of any scruples when dealing with unarmed civilians.