Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Nicolas nodded. Seven of the team had served with him in Antarctica, others had been assigned to the resistance units before the Fall of Washington, but he had confidence in all of them. The American Resistance would be the best prepared in history. Even the stay-behind units NATO had established for dealing with a Warsaw Pact invasion wouldn’t compare.

  “Good,” he said. There was no point in bothering with words of encouragement. They’d do it. “Move out.”

  He always thought of his daughter before a mission, remembering the blonde-haired princess she’d been the last time he’d seen her. The thought comforted him as he slipped back towards his position, knowing that snipers, missile teams and the handful of others were preparing to back him up. The aliens looked as if they hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. They were feeding the humans – he’d timed the offensive so that the POWs would be fed before they were liberated – but otherwise, everything was proceeding normally. They were about to pay for their confidence.

  “Take aim,” he muttered. The resistance was committed now. It was do or die time. The snipers would take out the alien soldiers on patrol, but how quickly could they react? No one knew for sure. “Fire!”

  Chapter Six

  Alien POW Camp, Virginia, USA

  Day 100

  Michael heard the noise and threw himself to the ground before his brain caught up and identified it. A second later, one of the watchtowers exploded, blowing a burning alien body down towards the ground. He saw a streak of light flash overhead and destroy a second watchtower, followed rapidly by the other two. The camp was under attack!

  “Stay down,” he shouted, although he doubted that he could be heard over the shooting. The prisoners had no weapons or ammunition. If the POWs stood up, they might be gunned down by accident, or perhaps the aliens would try to kill them to prevent them being rescued. “Keep your heads down and wait!”

  He heard, for the first time, an alien voice as alien warriors desperately tried to counter-attack. They’d been caught out in the open and were now mercilessly being shot down by their unseen attackers. He saw one of the aliens roll over and start firing bursts of blinding light into the cover, but he couldn’t see what the alien was shooting at, if anything. Perhaps the alien himself didn’t know. A sniper put a shot through the alien’s head and he collapsed to the ground. A pair of aliens rushed towards the human position and were shot down. The remainder were falling back in fairly good order. It wouldn’t be long before they came back with reinforcements and started clearing out the humans one by one.

  The POW camp had been badly damaged, but the fence was still intact. It was too strong to be torn down by human hands, even if they all pushed at it. He hoped – prayed – that the resistance or whoever could free them before the aliens returned, or they were all dead. Somehow, he doubted that the aliens would just regard a rescue attempt as a harmless prank.

  ***

  Nicolas took careful aim at the last alien and saw him collapse under his shot. The alien warriors had been wiped out, apart from a handful who were retreating rapidly and laying down covering fire as they moved. The resistance could have taken them, but they hadn’t come to kill aliens, even alien warriors. God alone knew how much time they had before alien reinforcements arrived and drove them away.

  He keyed his radio – there was no point in not using it now – and barked an order. “Group One, with me. Group Two, watch our backs!”

  The radio buzzed once. Nicolas nodded, jumped up, and ran down towards the fence…and the POWs waiting beyond. They looked battered and desperate, yet there was new hope in their eyes. He smiled in relief. He’d rescued a handful of prisoners from terrorists and many of them had been badly treated by their captors, but the aliens didn’t seem to go in for sadism. He remembered the human medical subjects at their base in Antarctica and mentally corrected himself. They didn’t go in for sadism unless there was a purpose to it. They didn’t torture for the fun of it, unlike some terrorists he’d captured or killed over the years. Did that make the aliens more or less virtuous than the terrorists?

  He pushed the thought out of his mind as he reached the fence. He’d brought cutters with him and started cutting through the fence at once. The aliens had probably liberated the wire from a National Guard deport or perhaps a police storage dump, because it was human-produced, not alien. Cutting through it was a slow job, but with five men working on it, it was easy to tear their way through the wire. He opened the first fence and walked through to the second, checking the ground as he moved. If he had designed the POW camp, without any regard for liberal opinion, he would have scattered landmines between the two fences, just to deter anyone from climbing over and trying to escape. The aliens clearly hadn’t thought of it, or perhaps they simply hadn’t bothered. Nothing exploded and blew him into red mist.

  “We came for you,” he yelled, as he started work on the next fence. It would have been a lot easier with tractors or trucks to help tear the fence open, but the aliens had removed all human vehicles from the area. The internet reports stated that they had pressed human vehicles into service – along, often enough, with human drivers – but not anywhere near the POW camp. “The war’s not over yet!”

  The first torrent of prisoners came pouring out of the camp as the fence broke, running for freedom. Nicolas shouted orders and the handful of men who’d been prepared to serve as reception officers took command, rounding up POWs and directing them towards the support units, hidden away miles from the alien base. They’d probably react harshly to any large number of people in the area, suspecting that they were escaped prisoners, but most of them would escape before the aliens could organise a cordon and start searching the area. Once they reached the support units, they could be rearmed and sent to join resistance units. He hoped there were a handful of training officers among the POWs. The resistance had plenty of volunteers from civilian communities, but few of them had any military training. They needed someone to show them the ropes.

  He keyed his radio again. “Check the aliens, strip them of anything interesting, and get it to the right location,” he said. They didn’t dare risk precise statements over the radio. A noted terrorist had been captured after he told his mother over a cell phone where he was hiding. The aliens couldn’t be allowed to do the same to the resistance. “And make sure they’re dead!”

  “Over there,” the Sergeant said, waving him towards the single building. A handful of POWs were trying to carry men on stretchers, escorted by a pair of men who were clearly civilians. They might have been collaborators, but with the POWs nearby, it didn’t seem likely. “Sir…”

  Nicolas winced. The wounded couldn’t be left in the camp. The aliens might not kill them out of hand, but they’d beef up their security in all of the POW camps, those that survived the day. Coordinating so many offences had been tricky, but if it had paid off, thousands of prisoners would be liberated before the aliens could react and lock down the camps. If not…even a half-success would be welcome. They desperately needed another victory. Knocking down the big alien command ship hadn’t won the war.

  “Round up some of the POWs and detail them to carry the wounded,” he ordered, flatly. The wounded were going to have an unpleasant trip, but there was no choice, unless they wanted to remain behind in the camp. “Tell the doctors that they’ve been press-ganged into the resistance and that they can’t go home again, not with the aliens breathing down their necks. Move!”

  He checked inside the building quickly, noting how primitive the entire medical centre had been, before abandoning it. If there was time, his team would rig the complex with Claymore mines and other surprises to delay pursuit, even though the aliens would probably not bother to rebuild the POW camp. They’d be more inclined to transport POWs to somewhere far more unfriendly – Alaska, perhaps. There were far fewer official resistance movements in Alaska.

  “Most of the prisoners are on their way,” the Sergeant reported. “The fire teams are in position,
but some of the prisoners want to stay behind and join them.”

  “Denied,” Nicolas said. They passed through the hole in the fence and left the POW camp behind. He thought about setting fire to the tents and burning it to the ground, but there was little point. We don’t need to risk more lives.”

  His radio buzzed once. “Incoming, sir,” the spotter said. “Get ready…”

  Nicolas ducked as an alien heavy transport materialised overhead. It had been moving so fast that he hadn’t even realised that it was on its way until it had arrived. There was no sonic boom – no one knew how the aliens did that – or any other warning, apart from the spotter’s report. Alien warriors were already pouring out of the vessel’s underside, somehow floating rapidly to the ground. Nicolas had gone through HALO training himself, but the aliens had a whole new twist, somehow.

  He keyed his radio. “Fire,” he ordered. “Hit them!”

  Two SAM missiles were launched by the MANPAD teams, directly towards the heavy transport. The machine guns opened fire on the alien warriors, sending some of them falling to the ground, dead. The heavy transport lit up like a Christmas tree as the missiles struck home, but somehow it remained in the air, turning to bring its weapons to bear on the imprudent humans who had dared to fire on it. Nicolas threw himself to the ground as it pounded the resistance position, killing both of the antiaircraft team. He pulled himself to his feet and kept moving as the alien craft moved on to the machine gun positions, ignoring their puny attempts to shoot it down with their weapons. It’s drive field glinted and sparked as they fired on it, but there were no other effects.

  Nicolas keyed his radio quickly. “Show a leg,” he snapped. The code phase meant that it was time to leave, immediately. “I repeat, show a leg!”

  The alien craft opened fire again, pounding the machine gun nests into oblivion. Nicolas hoped that the crews had escaped before they were killed, although he suspected that they’d kept firing till the last. They couldn’t win a stand-up fight against the aliens, not without a hell of a lot more firepower and a weapon that would be guaranteed to work against their air support. Apache helicopters would be easier to take down. He fired at an alien head pursuing him and forced it to duck, before unhooking a grenade from his belt and throwing it at the alien. An explosion announced that it had detonated, but he didn’t look back. It was time to run.

  He’d expected that the aliens would pursue with as much force as they could and he wasn’t disappointed. Their heavy transport completed unloading its troops and then followed the retreating humans, tracking them from low level. He guessed that the aliens wanted captives rather than dead humans, or they would have blown him and the rest of the fugitives away from high above. It didn’t matter. He’d prepared for their pursuit. He kept running, hoping that the aliens would continue to follow the main group. The waiting surprise would be ready for them.

  A dark shadow fell over him as the alien craft drifted overhead. Just for a moment, he felt a flicker of awe, for nothing human flew like that. The aliens could have taught humanity so much, yet they had come in the spirit of war and hostility. Nicolas had heard several different versions of just how their contact with Earth had broken down into war, but in the end, it hardly mattered. It only took one side to fight a war and if the aliens had truly wanted peace, they could have easily have avoided fighting at all. It wasn't as if the human race could take the war to them. NASA had never produced anything worthwhile since the Space Shuttle. If they’d concentrated on building spacecraft instead of pretty pictures, perhaps America wouldn’t have been occupied and the human race wouldn’t be under threat of extinction.

  His radio buzzed and he threw himself to the ground as the first missile fired. The heavy handheld SAM launchers were an experimental design, built to tackle a new Russian helicopter design that was supposed to be even tougher than the Apache. Only a handful had ever been produced, but he had four of them with his team, along with a number of more mundane Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The alien craft had no time to evade and took all nine missiles directly in the drive field. It heeled over like a drunken man trying to walk, before it crashed into the ground directly behind him. The shock knocked him to the ground, but by some dark miracle, the alien craft didn’t explode. He felt dazed, but somehow he picked himself off the ground and kept running anyway. The alien ground troops would have something else to worry about. If he was really lucky, they might even have been squashed under the crashed ship.

  “Move,” he ordered, keying his radio one final time. “Everyone out!”

  ***

  The rendezvous warehouse looked like just any other warehouse. It was large, musty, and seemingly disused. The handful of rescued POWs – the others had been apparently escorted to other safe houses and meeting points - looked around nervously. They hadn’t expected a warehouse to serve as a meeting point, although in hindsight it should have been obvious. The warehouse was larger than a supermarket and provided more than enough room for the soldiers and their equipment. The wounded from their desperate flight had been treated by a pair of combat medics and now they were waiting. Michael wanted to leave, to go find his family, but the resistance fighters had warned them to stay down. The aliens would be hunting for them.

  “If I could have your attention, please,” a voice said. Michael looked around to see a man standing on a large shipping box, staring down at him. He was Special Forces, unless Michael was much mistaken, and reminded him of a SEAL he’d met while on deployment. “We’re the local resistance and we liberated you from your former home.”

  There were some chuckles. “Our friends back there are pissed, but there’s no sign that they know where we are,” the speaker continued. “We think that a handful of us – or you – got picked up or killed in the chase, yet most of the former prisoners got away. I won’t go into details – what you don’t know you can’t tell – but we gave the bastards a black eye today. They’re going to be hunting for all of you and they have your details now. My guess is that they or their quislings will expand their control and eventually put the entire country into lockdown. They may find you and take you back to the POW camp, or simply kill you out of hand. I know that none of you expected to fight a war in your own backyard, but like it or not, that’s the situation we are all faced with. You have a choice to make.

  “You can try to make your way back to your homes and your families, or you can join us in our war. I won’t take anyone with me who doesn’t want to fight. I don’t have the manpower to enforce proper discipline any longer. If you want to go home, you may leave. If you want to stay and fight, you are welcome to join us. We’ll parcel you out to resistance movements in the surrounding area, give you weapons and equipment, and you can give the bastards more than they bargained for. The choice is yours.”

  His voice softened slightly. “You know the dangers,” he added. “Your families may suffer for your decision. You may never see your loved ones again. You may wind up dead or worse. Rumour has it that the aliens have ways to turn you into a quisling against your will. I won’t think any less of anyone who decides not to carry on the fight. We’ll try and help those who want to go home before hitting the enemy again, and again, and again, until they are out of our country or we’re all dead. Resistance is not futile.”

  Michael laughed. “Sir,” he said, “I’m embarrassed that you even need to ask.”

  There were some chuckles and the dim mood was broken. “Think about it,” the SEAL said. “Make your own decision and then let us know. One way or another, we cannot stay here very long. The aliens may come knocking at any moment.”

  The discussion was very brief. The vast majority of liberated prisoners chose to join the resistance and carry on the fight. A handful of men, mainly with new families or relatives who needed them, insisted on returning home, if they could. There was no way to slip someone into the cities. It wasn't a complete loss, Michael was assured; the men who went back home could – and would – help in organising less offi
cial resistance. Besides, the Army and Marines had been volunteer-only for a reason. The last thing anyone needed was a resentful conscript behind them.

  He’d thought about it himself. Linking up with the survivors from Quantico had its attractions, quite apart from the chance to hit back at the aliens. He felt as if he had failed badly when he’d been captured and held in the camp, even though cold logic told him that there had been no choice. He felt as if he needed a chance to redeem himself, even at the cost of his own life. The resistance offered the best chance of hurting the aliens. Besides, if the aliens kept an eye on his family in hopes he’d show up and be arrested, he didn’t want to make it that easy for them. If they decided to punish his family…

  No, they wouldn’t do that, he told himself. Besides, his father had been a Marine himself and would have told him to get back to work and keep fighting, whatever the cost. He wouldn’t have thanked his son for walking away from the battlefield, especially if it was in his own home country. He made his decision and relaxed. Now he could go back to war.

  “We decided,” Michael said, once the men who insisted on returning home had been escorted out. “What now?”

  “Now we start moving you all into units that can use you,” the SEAL said. He gave him a wink. “The bastards aren’t going to know what hit them.”

  Chapter Seven

  Washington DC, USA (Occupied)