Their Darkest Hour

by Christopher Nuttall

  “I suggest you get out to the gate once the shooting starts,” Chris said. Coates hadn't realised it, but the moment the aliens realised that they were under attack, they’d blast every human vehicle moving near the base. The only thing preventing them from dropping KEWs on their heads would be the presence of hundreds of their own people. “You know where to go to link up with our people.”

  He scrambled down from the cap and rapped on the back of the lorry. The first bunch of soldiers, wearing the brown uniforms that the aliens issued to their collaborators, opened the doors and jumped down, weapons in hand. If they were lucky, the aliens would start gunning down their collaborators, convinced that they had turned on them. And even if they didn't, they’d be confused.

  “Come on,” he said. The aliens didn't allow their collaborators firearms. They’d know something was wrong the moment they saw the SA80s and antitank weapons. “Let’s go.”

  ***

  The problem with trying to make a defiant impression as one was waiting to be shot, Alex decided with a flash of humour, was that it took time for the enemy to get around to actually shooting. Their collaborators were busy making speeches, cursing the bitter-enders who felt that they had to carry on the fight even though it was hopeless. After the first speech, a second had begun, followed rapidly by a third. The viewing public would be getting very bored by now, Alex told herself, wondering if there was something she could do to speed up the affair. It was growing colder and she was hardly dressed for the weather.

  She caught sight of a group of aliens marching towards them, carrying their weapons at the ready. There was already one group of armed aliens with the collaborators, but perhaps the aliens had decided they needed two groups – or maybe three. What sort of threat did they think they were facing? They seemed almost laughably paranoid about their prisoners, even though they were tied and suffering the effects of torture.

  “And so, it is with the deepest regret that we must execute those who feel that they must resist the new world order,” one of the collaborators finally droned. Alex straightened upright as the aliens levelled their weapons, pointing directly at her head. Their bullets were larger than human-designed bullets, she’d noted, perhaps a testament to the tough leathery skin that protected the aliens from outside threats. “Their deaths will serve as a warning to those who feel that they can resist with impunity...”

  Alex closed her eyes, expecting the shot to come at any second. Instead, she heard alien grunts of alarm. She opened her eyes, just in time to see a small band of armed collaborators advancing on the aliens. Armed collaborators...? The aliens, caught in the open, swung around, too late. Alex threw herself to the ground as the newcomers opened fire, mowing down the aliens before they could take cover or return fire. A handful of collaborators were shot in the legs, knocking them to the ground. Alex glanced up as a figure bent down and sawed the plastic tie away from her wrists.

  “What...?” She managed. It was suddenly very hard to speak. “What’s going on?”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” The man demanded. “You’re being rescued!”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Alien Detention Camp

  United Kingdom, Day 41

  Tra’tro Yak’shat had been studying his records when the attack began. The Detention Camp wasn’t officially part of the Land Forces, although they provided the troopers who guarded it from insurgent attack. Instead, it fell under the purview of the Sha’ra, the intelligence service that safeguarded the State from enemies both inside and outside its territory. There hadn't been an intelligence network on Earth prior to the invasion – too great a chance of being discovered ahead of time, or so they’d said – and the intelligence officers were working overtime to build up networks they could use to hunt down human insurgents. It wasn't going too well.

  The Sha’ra had wide latitude when it came to intelligence gathering, and he’d been told that he had no need to know any of the gory details, but he'd heard enough to gather that they were using human rogues to torture their prisoners and extract confessions. Anything was permitted in the service of the State – and if the humans were unwilling to dispose of their own rogues, they had only themselves to blame – yet he found it hard to accept that such torture was permissible. The humans seemed to be their own worst enemies. Even the Sha’ra had been shocked at some of the rogues they’d allowed to live. Using them in the service of the State was...

  He jumped up as he heard the first explosion. The Sha’ra had ordered the execution of some of the prisoners – even to the point of bringing in their own executioners – and he’d been told to keep him and his troopers away from the execution ground, but explosions suggested that the base was under attack. The alarms sounded a second later, summoning the troopers to grab their weapons and repel the human insurgents. He picked up his own sidearm and ran towards the hatch. If the humans intended to attack his base, they’d get a few unpleasant surprises. He’d been careful to keep half his garrison under cover at all times, in the hopes that any human watchers would believe that he only had half as many troopers as he had. They’d be deploying now...

  Outside, the sound of gunfire was alarmingly close. The humans were already inside the fence...how was that even possible? And he could hear the sound of human mortars lobbing shells into the base. Explosions flared up from where they’d parked their helicopters and the shuttle that had brought the Sha’ra execution crew down from orbit. The entire base shook, seconds later, as the fuel dump exploded, blasting a colossal fireball into the air. Much of the base had been built to be fire resistant, but if the shuttle fuel had caught fire the prefabricated buildings would start to melt very quickly. Fire was already starting to spread over the grass the humans had used to mark out their runways. It wouldn't be long before the entire base went up in smoke.

  He lifted his weapon, too late, as he saw a pair of humans running towards him. The weapons in their hands flashed fire...and he felt a brief moment of pain, before he fell down into darkness.

  ***

  Chris saw antitank rockets smash into the guardpost, destroying the firing position before the aliens could bring their machine guns to bear on either side of the fence. The assault force outside had already taken out the other posts, allowing them to get close and start taking down the fence and push the blast walls aside. It would have been simpler to knock down the fence in a dozen places, but combat reports from America suggested that the aliens scattered mines between the two fences and they didn't have time to clear a path. Besides, it might be easier to get people out over the road.

  “Get the prisoners moving,” he bellowed. Sergeant Haywood heard him and started pushing the prisoners towards the gates. A second team headed towards the cages holding the remainder of the prisoners. Some of them prisoners looked as if they’d been beaten half to death, but they were all moving, if poorly. He’d have to assign people to help them get out of the base if they ran out of other options. “Get a team over and concentrated on the alien barracks!”

  The aliens seemed to have had a number of troopers hiding in a large building that had clearly been designed to serve as a fortress. Chris watched as they fired from portholes, forcing his men to stay back. Whoever had designed the building knew what he was doing, he admitted to himself; the aliens could cover all of the possible angles of approach, except directly above their building. He detailed two platoons of Royal Marines to keep the aliens pinned down, while rounding up a platoon to follow him towards the human-designed buildings. If their intelligence was correct, the humans the aliens had been using as interrogators would be based there.

  A small group of aliens had gone to ground behind a blast wall and were firing down towards the detention camp. Chris nodded to two of his men, who threw grenades over the blast wall and ducked for cover. Two shattering explosions tore through the aliens, sending bloody chunks of flesh flying everywhere. The alien body armour was good, he noted, with a flicker of envy. Several of the alien bodies were intact, even though
they’d been stunned or killed by the grenades. They put a bullet in each of the alien heads, just to be sure, as they reached the hanger. Inside, there was a small alien helicopter and a pair of aliens who had to be techs. They reached for weapons hanging by their sides, only to be shot down before they could draw them and open fire. Chris watched them fall and then glanced at the alien helicopter, wondering if they could fly it out of the base. A quick check revealed that it had been designed for beings with very different proportions than humans and it would be very difficult for a human to fly. Maybe two humans, with proper training...he pushed the thought aside as they ran towards the stairs. There was an entire underground complex underneath the hanger, one built back when the base had been preparing for war against the Russians. The aliens would probably have found it uncomfortable claustrophobic...

  “Incoming,” one of the sergeants yelled. Chris glanced up to see an alien helicopter swooping over the base, firing down towards the humans on the ground. A Stinger leapt up and slammed right into the alien craft, sending it heeling out of the sky and down to the ground, where it exploded in a massive fireball. “Sir...”

  Chris unhooked a grenade from his belt and motioned for the soldiers to get ready. A second later, he hurled it down the stairs, where it exploded. He followed it down, weapon ready to deal with anyone lying in ambush, only to see nothing more than scorched walls, illuminated by flickering light bulbs. They moved down and started to check each of the small rooms one by one. Most were empty, but a couple held wounded prisoners and one held a man who’d somehow managed to bite though his own wrists and commit suicide. Judging from the condition of his body, he’d been tortured so badly that he’d thought that he was on the verge of breaking and decided to silence himself permanently. Chris would have liked to take his body out of the alien base and bury it somewhere properly, but there wasn't time. The aliens would be responding, even now, to the attack on their territory. How long would it take them to get reinforcements to be base, or decide to cut their losses and drop KEWs on their heads? The only thing keeping them from doing that was the aliens holding their building on the surface.

  The final set of doors were locked, but Chris slapped an explosive pack against the doors and jumped back, allowing the explosive pack to blow the door off its hinges. Inside, there were five men, cowering under the table. Chris recognised two of them as people the aliens had recruited to serve as interrogators, which probably meant that they were all interrogators. He nodded to his men, who seized the interrogators, searched them roughly, and then bundled them back towards the stairwell. They’d be taken back to the resistance base, interrogated themselves, and then executed. After seeing what they’d done to the prisoners, he had no room left in him for mercy.

  A shuffling sound further down the corridor caught his attention and he unhooked his torch from his belt, pointing the beam of light into the darkness. Dark eyes stared back at him and he almost fired reflexively, before realising that the alien was unarmed. How could it even be in the underground complex? Chris wasn't claustrophobic, but he'd had to crawl through all kinds of tunnels at Catterick and the alien had to find the human tunnels proportionally worse than he’d found the drains he’d had to explore. It struck him a moment later that the alien had to be one of their intelligence officers. Who else would want to be so close to the interrogation rooms?

  He pointed his gun at the alien’s head and glared at him. “Can you understand me?”

  The alien seemed to quiver, and then nodded. “You’re coming with us,” Chris said. “We won’t hurt you as long as you behave yourself, understand?”

  There was a pause, and then the alien nodded again. A student of humanity, perhaps? Human body language had to be alien to the Leathernecks, just as their own body language was almost unreadable to humanity. He looked at the alien’s clawed hands and winced, inwardly. The last thing he wanted was the alien behind him with those natural weapons. He’d heard stories that suggested that the alien claws could cut through flesh and bone.

  He jerked the gun upwards and the aliens shuffled to his feet. Chris stepped to one side and motioned for her to move towards the stairs and he obeyed, slowly. He couldn't tell if the alien was moving slowly because he was claustrophobic or because he was hoping that its fellows would come to the rescue. Chris poked the alien impatiently in the rear end and the alien jerked, before moving a little faster. His massive bulk blocked half the corridor.

  “Get him to the surface and out of the base,” Chris ordered, before peering through the remaining tunnels. The lighting was failing, suggesting that the base’s emergency generator had been damaged in the fighting. Or maybe it was just designed to add to the effect. “We’ll finish searching down here and then get up to join you.”

  The remaining rooms were empty, apart from one which had a pair of laptops and several large hard drives piled on one table. They were definitely human manufacture, which seemed rather odd – even though the aliens had been noted as having an interest in human computers and rounding up human experts they could put to work somewhere outside Britain. He picked them up anyway, remembering their intelligence sweeps through Taliban hideouts back before the invasion, where they’d found all kinds of interesting information – and porn – on their software. The intelligence staff would study the laptops and determine if the interrogators had stored anything useful on their systems. Who knew? There might be videos of their interrogation sessions that could be played at their trial.

  He glanced into the final room and blinked in surprise. The interrogators had turned what had once been a small kitchen into a chamber of horrors. A small pile of tools lay beside a hospital table, which was stained with blood and shit and piss. He recoiled, despite himself, wondering how anyone could get their kicks by torturing helpless victims. A cigarette lighter, a welding torch, a dental knife, a rattan cane, a pair of wire cutters...he could see how they’d used each and every one of them to break their victims. He felt sick, fighting down the urge to go find the interrogators and put a bullet through their brains. Even the Taliban hadn’t been so unpleasant to their captives.

  A glance in a cupboard revealed a small fortune’s worth of cannabis and heroin, as well as some luxury foodstuffs that had been unavailable since the invasion. He couldn’t tell if the interrogators had used them for themselves or tormented their captives with them, although he could see how they might addict someone to a drug and then leave the withdrawal symptoms as yet another form of torture. One compartment held booze, mainly the muck that various farmers were trying to brew in the absence of government officials to tell them not to make their own. Some of the bottles, however, were old enough to impress even the hardened officers in the mess. Chris couldn't imagine what the torturers had done with the booze.

  “Splash the fuel around here and let’s go,” he ordered, harshly. He didn't quite recognise his own voice. Outside the room, back in the darkened tunnels, he could see just how easily the torturers could break their victims. They’d be able to convince them that the tunnels went on forever, that there was no hope of escape...the bastards must have been laughing as they enjoyed making people suffer. Perhaps they hadn't even produced results.

  He unhooked a small bottle from his belt and splashed the contents around as they headed back to the stairs. The compound had been devised by chemists – it was a distant relative of napalm – but they’d never been allowed to use it in action. They’d followed the ROEs carefully when the world had made sense, yet they no longer mattered now. He pulled a small detonator from his belt as they reached the top of the stairs and tossed it down the shaft. It produced a spark which ignited the liquid, sending flames roaring through the underground complex. The torture chamber, the supplies the torturers had hoarded and the evidence of their grizzly task went up in flames. By the time it burned itself out, it would have incinerated everything, leaving the aliens nothing, but ashes.

  “Get the prisoners out to the RV point,” he ordered, as he headed back out
into the open. The sound of shooting grew louder from the direction of the alien strongpoint. They were merely keeping the aliens pinned down, rather than trying to kill them – and invite the aliens to bombard the base from orbit. “Have we emptied the wire?”

  The aliens had established two detention cages, one male, one female. They’d cut through the wire once they’d driven the aliens back from the execution grounds, but several of the prisoners were too terrified to move. Others had started streaming out as soon as the wire had been cut, heading out to the countryside and hopefully away from the aliens. Chris had detailed men to round up the prisoners and take them to resistance hideouts, but if any of the prisoners wanted to go their own way, that was fine with him. The further they were spread over the countryside, the harder it would be for the aliens to round them all up again. He did hope that they were smart enough not to go home. The aliens and their collaborators would presumably have lists of who had escaped and where their families lived, assuming they has families.

  He glanced back at the alien base and allowed himself a quick smile. They’d devastated the place. Many of the buildings were tough enough to take the flames without being completely wrecked, but they’d killed dozens of aliens and destroyed their interrogation program. And they’d even destroyed a handful of alien vehicles. No one was quite sure how long it would take for the aliens to get resupplied from their homeworld, yet it would throw a crimp into their invasion and occupation plans. And even that didn't take account of how badly their reputation would suffer. Once the news of the raid got out on the internet, resistance fighters all over the world would take heart and try their own attacks on alien bases.