Their Darkest Hour

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Clear,” he called back up, once he’d reached the bottom. The sewer network extended all the way from London out into the countryside. London was honeycombed with tunnels, some known to the public; others known only to the government, or simply forgotten in the years since they’d been built and abandoned. It was a way to get in and out of the city without being detected or stopped by the aliens. “Come on down. The smell is terrible.”

  The others chuckled as they clambered down and found themselves in an abandoned sewer, standing on a walkway that led into the darkness. “Better not fall into that,” one of the Marines commented. “Worse than that shitty pond at Kandahar.”

  Chris snorted as he started leading the way down the walkway. “You want to bet that some mutant turtles have been breeding down here,” he said, flashing the beam of light over the still water. “People used to put crocodiles down here with the rest of the shit they threw out.”

  “Thank you, sir,” the Marine said. “I won’t ever be able to wipe that image from my mind.”

  The walk seemed to stretch out into hours. It was strange to think that the aliens were just above them, watching for any signs of trouble. Chris knew that smaller parties of insurgents were meant to be launching a series of attacks to keep the aliens busy, but there was no way to know just how they were faring down in the tunnels. The torch flickered once as they reached a crossroads, reminding him of all the horror stories he'd read of monsters lurking deep underground. Aliens from Alien, sewer monsters from The X-Files...as a kid, he’d loved watching horror movies. And even as an adult, the memory still sent a chill running down his spine.

  They reached the end of the tunnel and stopped dead. There was supposed to be a way around the blockage, into the parts of the sewers that were still working. Chris puzzled over the chart, before realising that they had walked past a smaller tunnel that connected to the main stream. The roof seemed to be closing in on them as they passed through a hidden door and out into the main body of the sewers. From what he recalled, most of the sewage was pumped out of the city, cleansed and then...actually, he couldn't remember what happened then. They weren’t allowed to simply pump it into the Thames any longer, if he recalled correctly.

  “Jesus,” one of the men commented. “What a fucking pong.”

  Chris nodded, trying hard to breathe through his nose. In the distance, he could hear the sound of pumps pushing the sewerage through the tunnels. The environment was a breeding ground for rats, according to the briefing – he saw one running along a pipe before vanishing into the darkness. They seemed to have almost no fear of humanity, running up and almost touching their boots before jumping back to avoid kicks from the soldiers. Chris remembered that rats had carried diseases in pre-modern times and shuddered. The aliens had broken down a great many health and safety systems. There were probably places in Britain where scurvy and other long-forgotten diseases had returned to torment the human race.

  He saw a light in the distance and reached for his pistol, before realising that it was the welcoming committee. Two of the soldiers who had been in London ever since the invasion were waiting for them, including someone he hadn't seen since the Battle of London, when he’d been swept out of the city by the river. He called his name and ran forward, heedless of the danger of slipping and falling into the shit. It had been far too long since they’d seen one another.

  “Bongo,” he said, as they hugged. “I thought you were dead!”

  “I thought you were dead, you old pirate,” Bongo said. He’d come from Jamaica to join the British Army and had been streamlined into the Household Division. “What the fuck blew you out of London?”

  “The aliens,” Chris said, as Bongo pointed to the ladder leading upwards to the safe house. He couldn't imagine which civil servant had been so paranoid as to designate a handful of houses as emergency evacuation points, but he had to admit that the paranoia had made it a great deal easier to slip into London. “What have you been doing with yourself, then?”

  Bongo filled him in once they reached the top and clambered out into the safe house. Chris had seen a couple like it while he’d been on close-protection details, places where MI5 could debrief defectors or notable public figures could hide from the media. It looked perfectly normal from the outside, but most of the building would be wired for sound and the tapes stored at a different location. He hoped they'd taken out the bugs once they’d started to use it as a base.

  “Oh, we’re not based here,” Bongo said, when he asked. “There’s too much chance that someone will come across a reference to the place in the files – too many damn bureaucrats went over to the aliens. We just use it because it has access to the sewers.”

  He made a show of glancing at his watch. “We'll have to wait here until the sun goes down,” he added, “so we may as well have a brew. I hope you bought some teabags from outside...?”

  “And a few army-issue packed lunches,” Chris said, with a grin.

  “Bastard,” Bongo said, without heat. “Anyway...what have you been doing with yourself since Westminster?”

  ***

  It was an hour before Bongo decided that the night had fallen far enough to allow them to slip out onto the streets. The aliens and their collaborators had put a stop to London’s once-celebrated nightlife by enforcing a curfew, but they didn't really have the manpower to keep it firmly in place outside Central London. Bongo and the rest of the resistance could still move about with impunity as long as they didn't go too close to the aliens, who had night-vision gear and a willingness to open fire without confirming that the contact was actually hostile. Most humans knew to give them a wide berth.

  Chris had grown up in London and had loved the city, even though he’d left school with few qualifications and little hope of a worthwhile job outside the army. Looking at the city now tore at his heart. Buildings had been destroyed, or reduced to blackened shells of what they’d once been; the once-endless traffic had been driven off the road, leaving London’s population forced to walk from place to place on foot. Burned-out cars were everywhere, a reminder that the aliens sometimes used them for target practice; others had bullet holes through their windscreens or superstructure. He saw a handful of dead bodies as they slipped onwards and wondered just how many had died in the weeks since the aliens had landed. London had had a huge population once, but now...now there was no way to know how many were left. He only saw a couple of living humans as they walked through the gloom.

  Bongo had said that many of the gangs had wiped each other out. They’d been dependent upon selling drugs to customers, drugs that were no longer available because the aliens had sealed off London and destroyed world shipping. The gangs had been reduced to fighting over the last few bags of cocaine or heroin, while their customers had been forced to go cold turkey, weaning themselves off the drugs the hard way. Chris had nothing, but contempt for those who became enslaved to the needle or snorting powder, yet many of the addicts would have suffered greatly for lack of their crutch. One more crime to blame on the Leathernecks, he told himself, as they reached what had once been a large housing estate. The locals probably knew that the resistance had a base there, but hadn’t breathed a word to the police. They’d probably felt that having the resistance there was good for them. The resistance certainly didn't waste time taking protection money or all the other tricks the gangs used to pull.

  “Come on,” Bongo hissed. Inside, the massive block of flats smelled faintly of urine. “I’m sorry about the stench, but we can't risk standing out from the crowd.”

  Chris nodded as the doors closed behind them. “Welcome to one of our staging bases,” Bongo said. He nodded towards a team of four people who had been waiting for them. “Abdul – SAS dude, very brave or thoroughly crazy. Jake – local volunteer, smart-ass. Janet – our...ah, contact with some of the police. And Fatima – our doctor.”

  “Welcome to London,” Abdul said, dryly. He might not have been wearing a proper uniform – none of them were –
but he managed to look as if he was dressed for parade. “I think you’ll hate what we’ve done to the place.”

  He shrugged and stood up. “There are places to sleep here, so get some rest,” he added. “In the morning, we will start checking out our targets and planning the final stages of the operation. And then we’re going to send a lot of people out through the tunnels before the shit hits the fan.”

  Chris nodded. “Let the CO know that we got here,” he said. “How do you plan to check out the targets?”

  Abdul smiled. “Let’s just say that we had a little help and leave it at that,” he said. “You don’t need to know the precise details.”

  ***

  The following morning, after a breakfast that mainly consisted of the ration packs they’d carried through the tunnels, Abdul led Chris and a couple of others out into the city. They’d all been issued ID cards that noted their occupation as workers, people who moved from place to place to do manual labour for the alien overlords. London had simply too much damage to clear up and almost everyone who wasn't in a priority occupation had been tasked to help with the work – or starve. It was an attitude that Chris found rather understandable – it would certainly have helped clear up many of Britain’s inner cities and housing estates – but the aliens didn’t care about the niceties. From what many of the resistance fighters who’d stayed in London had reported, the aliens pushed the workers as hard as they could.

  Dozens of work gangs roamed the city, clearing up smashed or burned-out cars, carting away debris from fallen buildings and even picking up dead bodies from where they’d been abandoned. Chris wouldn't have been surprised to discover that Londoners had an epidemic on their hands as well as everything else, just from the number of dead bodies that had been left to rot for a few days. The teams that cleaned up the dead wore NBC suits and were apparently granted special privileges by the aliens. Chris doubted that anyone could be given enough privileges to make the work worthwhile.

  And there were policemen everywhere in Central London. Chris watched them checking ID cards as they patrolled, remembering the stories he’d heard about the French Resistance and those who had collaborated with the Germans. The police might have started to collaborate out of a desire to keep the public safe, but now they were nothing more than a millstone around London’s neck. Some of the men wearing police uniforms reminded Chris of the torturers he’d pulled out of the Detention Camp and executed, men who wanted to indulge their dark tastes and were willing to serve the aliens in exchange for having their way with their victims. Others looked ashamed and tried to do as little as possible.

  The aliens themselves were very much in evidence. Chris watched as they ran armed patrols through London, waiting for one of the resistance fighters to take a shot at them. When they were engaged, they threw back a hail of bullets, with an alarming lack of concern for civilians who might be caught up in the crossfire. They didn't seem to recognise that some people just wanted to get on with their lives and ignore politics; anyone they caught close to the resistance fighter was often dragged away and dumped in the back of an alien vehicle.

  “They go outside the city to one of the camps,” Abdul muttered, as they busied themselves carting away rubble. “The Leathernecks sometimes press them into service, but mostly they just seem to leave them in the camps. We don't know why...”

  “We don’t know a great deal about them,” Chris muttered back. They’d been studying the alien base they’d built on the remains of Buckingham Palace, a base that was heavily guarded, without any humans allowed to pass through the fence. The intelligence briefing had stated that the alien commander charged with invading and occupying Britain was based there, which explained the precautions. They had to feel more isolated than the Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad had felt during the war in Iraq. “It’s not going to be easy to get in there, not if they don't let humans into the building.”

  “There are some humans allowed in,” Abdul said. “Their collaborator-in-chief, for one. I don’t think he’d help us unless we pointed a gun at his head and I think the aliens would probably notice if we did.”

  Chris chuckled. The aliens did seem to be curiously uninterested in some human activities, although there seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their disinterest. They didn't seem to be interested in what humans were wearing, or in sex, even though both of them were clues to another human that something might not be right. He picked up another piece of rubble and dropped it in the cart, shaking his head. The aliens had their weaknesses, just like humans. All they had to figure out how to do was use their weaknesses against them.

  His lips twitched with sly amusement. If it was that easy, he knew, everyone would be doing it.

  They’d definitely realised that having their troops keep a fixed routine was a dangerous mistake. The patrols through London seemed to be random, while the guards patrolling the fence surrounding their base were varying their routine. Chris suspected, from the way they were moving, that there were probably reinforcements inside the base, just as there had been at the Detention Camp. But apart from that...? The closest major alien base was outside the city. If they could pin down the forces defending the base itself, they could run riot before the aliens could respond...

  ***

  “I think you’re going to be going out of the city tonight,” Bongo said. Fatima nodded, tiredly. Her skills had helped save lives, but she’d watched too many people die because she didn't have the supplies or equipment to save them. “Once you get through the tunnels, you’ll probably be taken up north with some of the others.”

  Fatima sighed. She’d never really been out of London, apart from a brief trip to Edinburgh. Her stepmother had wanted her to go to Pakistan, but Fatima had refused – she’d suspected that her stepmother had intended to marry her off. And now...where was her stepmother? The aliens had taken her away and...what? Had they killed her, or imprisoned her, or...she wasn't anyone important, not really. Hardly the kind of person they'd want to interrogate thoroughly.

  But she’d been related to the first suicide bomber. That alone made her a person of interest.

  “I see,” she said, finally. “When do you want me to be ready?”

  “Get your stuff ready when you have a moment,” Bongo said. “We’ll have to wait until dark anyway. They might spot us moving through the streets in daytime.”

  Fatima grinned, realising that she was being teased. As far as she knew, the aliens still wanted her for the crime of being related to a young man foolish enough to blow himself up – along with hundreds of humans and a dozen aliens. The collaborator government kept making that point on the BBC, reminding everyone of the evils of suicide bombing. Fatima couldn’t really disagree, even though she’d disliked the young asshole. He’d thought that all women should be neither seen nor heard.

  “Right,” she said. “Will you be coming with me?”

  “Probably not,” Bongo said. “I have work to do here.”

  Fatima nodded. “Good luck,” she said. “May God go with you.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  North England

  United Kingdom, Day 51

  “I think we have a problem.”

  Gavin looked over at the operator. He was manning one of the computer stations monitoring alien activity in the region, using their own computer networks against them. It gave them a view of what the aliens were doing, although he had to keep reminding himself not to take it for granted. The aliens, if they ever worked out what the humans were doing, could get around it by simply disconnecting from the network.

  “The aliens have dispatched a flight of aircraft coming right towards our position,” the operator said. “Their ETA is roughly ten minutes - perhaps less. I think we've been rumbled.”

  The damned captive, Gavin thought, angrily. The decision to release the alien might have made sense, but there had been no time to conceal their tracks properly. All the aliens had had to do was look at their orbital observations and they might well
be able to track the small team back to the holding cell. And the PM and several other officials were based nearby as well.

  “Send the alert to the PM’s bodyguards and tell them to get his ass out of there,” he ordered, flatly. Seven minutes...not very long at all. There wouldn't be any hope of completely dissembling the base and vanishing before the aliens arrived. “And then start the destruct sequence on our computers. I want nothing left that could lead the aliens to any other bases.”

  “Aye, sir,” the operator said. There was a bleep from his console. “Sir, they’ve also started detailing land forces in our general direction. Should I send an update to the picketers?”