Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  The security of the base was a recurring concern. Area 53 – and Area 52, the home of the crashed alien ship that had alerted the human race to its new enemy – had been secret even before the aliens had arrived, so secret that most of the files concerning their existence had been wiped long ago. No alien ships had descended on either of the bases to offload warriors to occupy them – as the aliens had occupied more well-known bases – but Alex privately suspected that it was only a matter of time. The aliens had clearly captured some files from Washington and any one of them might have a reference that would lead them to Area 53 – and the captive alien. He’d been told that there were hundreds of other such bases, hidden away in unpopulated areas and concealed even from the locals, but the aliens had clearly stumbled across at least one of them. They’d broken into the Vice President’s bunker and captured him…and no one knew how they’d located him. No one had even known that he’d been captured until he started making speeches to the nation.

  And there was another concern. Area 53 had been originally intended as a research site for biological warfare and had been sited well away from innocent civilian populations. The aliens had started to settle parts of Flyover Country from orbit – driving away or capturing the humans living in the rural areas – and their expansion might eventually lead them over Area 53, even without knowing what they’d taken. If it was entirely up to him, he would have moved the captive out of the country completely, but that would be tricky. The slightest hint that something wasn't quite right would bring the aliens down on their heads and that would be the end.

  He looked up at the image of the alien warrior and smiled. “We put all of these images through facial recognition software,” he said. He’d studied such software during his time at the Foreign Technology Division, when the world had made sense and he wasn't a fugitive hiding in a Cold War era bunker. The software had never been as capable as its proponents and detractors had claimed, yet it did sometimes lead to interesting results. “They found that the alien warriors fell into two general categories.”

  The images sharpened, revealing two different warrior faces. One had a slightly sharper chin and more focused eyes than the other. “There’s no way to know for sure, but the analysts think that they might be male and female, rather than differences caused by being different racial subsets or castes,” he said. “It could be that we’ve been looking in the wrong place for alien females. They might have been right under our noses all the time.”

  “The alien we have here and the dead aliens back at Area 52 are definitely male,” Jane said, flatly. “Unless their reproduction is radically different from ours, perhaps like fish or lizards, they have to have an internal womb and other human-like attributes. We really need an alien female to dissect.”

  “We’ll try and get you one,” Alex promised, knowing that it was a promise he might not be able to keep. The aliens killed since the Fall of Washington had all been killed in brief encounters, not battles where alien bodies might be recovered. The resistance had considered sneaking back to try to recover alien bodies hours after the fighting, but it had rapidly become clear that the aliens removed their bodies and took them back to their bases. “Have you made any more progress with our friend?”

  Jane scowled angrily. The alien held in the secure bio containment lab certainly understood English, but seemed completely unable to speak it, although when pressed he – if it was a he – had made noises in the alien language. It was a weird atonal language composed of everything from whines to clicks and hisses, utterly beyond the ability of the human mouth to reproduce. It was clear that some aliens could speak English – and presumably other human languages as well – yet it apparently wasn't an ability they all shared. The reports from the resistance units operating in the towns and cities confirmed that some of the warriors spoke English, but not all of them.

  Or perhaps they all speak English and are playing dumb to lure us into making mistakes, he cautioned himself. The aliens were alien. They might think that it made perfect sense to abandon a missing comrade and refuse to speak to the humans in their own language. No one knew anything about how their culture and society were ordered, or just how the different castes interacted. Every time he thought that he understood it, a new piece of data would come along and force him to re-evaluate his theories. Understanding other cultures had never been an interest of his…

  And there were plenty of differences between human cultures, let alone humans and aliens. America had a very different culture to Russia, and they were both practically identical compared to China, or the Middle East. In the Middle East – at least, before the alien invasion – Jane would have been married off by now and have at least three kids, and she would have been very lucky if she was allowed to study medicine. Alex had never believed in cultural relativism – the belief that all cultures had the same inherent right to exist – and it was clear that the aliens shared his lack of concern. They thought nothing of reshaping America – and the rest of the world – to suit their own motives. For all he knew, the Leaders ran their society and considered the remaining castes expandable.

  “Jenny and Marilyn are working on him now,” Jane said. “They’ve been trying to teach the alien sign language and he seems to be picking up on it fairly quickly. I suppose it helps if he wants to convince us to feed him better, or stop hurting him…”

  Alex blinked. “We’re not hurting him, are we?”

  “Would we know if we were?” Jane countered. “For all we know, the food we’re giving him is basically slop and gruel, like the stuff they give the people under their direct control.”

  “I see,” Alex said. The foodstuffs recovered from crashed alien ships had run out after a few days, forcing the alien to try human food, or starve. It seemed that the alien preferred bland human food to anything flavoured, although it was impossible to say for sure. Eggs had caused the alien to vomit everything over the table and spend the next two days shivering. It might have made an interesting biological weapon, Alex had thought at the time, but there was no way to test it. He’d suggested that the resistance try to find a way to get eggs into the alien diet, yet no one had been able to come up with a way of doing so. Besides, it might provoke savage reprisals against the human communities. “But we’re letting him chose his own food.”

  That was a sore spot among the handful of humans who knew that there was a captured alien on the base. Food at Area 53 was never very good at the best of times – the base had only been reactivated two months ago – and what stores there were had to be conserved carefully. A fully-manned military base could go through an awesome amount of food in a very short space of time, rations or no rations, and the thought that the alien might be living large while others felt as they were on the verge of starvation was a cause of distress. Master Sergeant George Grosskopf, the commander of the Base Security Team – and the one who’d captured the alien in the first place – had reported having to speak quite sharply to several soldiers who complained about the alien diet. A handful had been released to join the resistance in other parts of the state – Las Vegas was apparently proving a handful for the aliens – but the remainder had no choice, but to stay. They knew too much.

  “In theory, our food should be safe for them to eat,” Jane said. They both knew that that wasn't a good thing. “In practice…it’s possible that he’s missing out on essential nutrients and other vital elements of his diet. It’s not as if we understand everything about them, is it?”

  “No,” Alex said. He clicked off the images of the alien warriors and poured himself a cup of coffee. It might have been his imagination, but he could have sworn that it was weaker than he normally preferred. The base’s coffee supplies were under armed guard. “I wonder if they know as much as they think they know about us.”

  He clicked the remote control and switched the screen to the local channel. CNN, FOX and WNN had vanished along with the satellites, leaving a void, until the aliens had started to fill it with their own propaga
nda. The collaborators on the screen spoke about the joys that alien rule would bring to the planet, with long sections on how alien technology had healed the sick, reformed the criminal and removed the blight of nuclear power from the land. It didn’t seem to occur to them that fusion power stations were nuclear as well, or that the aliens could tighten their grip through controlling the power supply…or perhaps it had occurred to them. Alex found it hard to understand how someone would willingly sell themselves to the aliens and work for them, but perhaps the collaborators were desperate, or wanted power. There was no way to know what their motives were, yet at least they weren’t among the Walking Dead. They had chosen to serve the aliens willingly.

  “In other news, the Order Police has started to deploy over a million fully-trained police officers to bring order back to the streets,” the collaborator on the screen said. She had a bra size, he decided, that was larger than her IQ. Her breasts kept threatening to burst out of her shirt and flop about on the screen. There were people in the Bible Belt who would faint if they saw her. “They will ensure that terrorists and insurgents are driven away from innocent people and eventually wiped out.”

  Alex considered her words, automatically dismissing the claim that they had over a million policemen. If they had that many to deploy, in addition to alien forces, the war was within shooting distance of being lost. The more interesting point was the losses among innocents caught up in the fighting. The official resistance had tried hard to avoid killing civilians, yet there were plenty of unofficial groups out there and the collaborators had made much of their atrocities. The images of bloodstained bodies and dead children had been splashed across the world’s screens…all blamed, of course, on the insurgents.

  Santini had pointed out, in a fit of rage, that back when he’d been in Iraq, all the innocent civilian deaths had been blamed on the Americans. Never mind that the insurgents had a habit of using civilians as human shields. Never mind that some of the nastier groups had intended to kill as many innocents as possible to trigger a civil war. Never mind that American soldiers did everything they could to keep down civilian casualties…the media had licked up the shit they’d been fed by the insurgents and come back for more. It hadn’t surprised him in the slightest and he’d been more than happy to expound upon his theory at length.

  “We used to joke about fragging reporters in the sandbox, but none of us ever did,” he’d said. “The reporters knew we’d never kill them even if they blew an operation wide open. The insurgents, on the other hand, considered any reporter who spoke against them a legitimate target, so the reporters stopped trying to speak against them and effectively supported them instead. Terror works. But then, most reporters are really good at rationalising it so they don’t sound like fucking cowards.”

  “That girl should be on the target list,” Alex said, finally. The resistance websites included lists of collaborators and encouragement for anyone who wanted to assassinate one or more of them. The collaborators had started moving their people into secure areas to evade assassins. “Do you want to place bets on when she dies?”

  “Doctors shouldn’t bet on a person’s death,” Jane said, tartly. “I wonder if…”

  She broke off as her pager buzzed. “There’s something happening with the alien,” she said. “Coming?”

  Alex followed her though the base’s winding corridors into the bio-containment area. Extensive tests had confirmed that there was no biohazard from the aliens – the aliens themselves had confirmed it as well, although they’d lied so often that people were wary about taking them at their word – but the base commander had insisted on keeping the levels sealed, just in case. Alex suspected that he had visions of the alien somehow breaking out of his confinement and making his way to the surface and escaping, but that was absurd. Comic book aliens were one thing – Superman had gained superpowers under Earth’s yellow sun – but real aliens were just…mortals. The aliens had a grasp of technology that exceeded mankind’s, they could do things that humans could not, yet they were not gods. They could be outthought. They could be beaten.

  Jenny met them at the door and waved them in. She looked rather like a head cheerleader in High School, but she’d actually come directly from the NSA as a language expert. She’d been born into an Ambassador’s family and at seven years old, according to her file, she’d been able to speak five different languages. She’d added a new one every two years, improving and expanding her fluency well beyond even specialists in a single language. The NSA had recognised her talents and hired her as a language expert, training her until she could pick up the gist of a language with terrifying speed. Marilyn had been added as an afterthought, but Alex had been impressed when he realised that someone had had a brainstorm. There were humans who couldn’t speak, for various reasons, and they learned sign language. Why couldn’t the aliens do the same?

  “I’ve actually made progress on deciphering their spoken language,” Jenny explained, as they stepped into the outer room. The alien was held in a surprisingly luxurious apartment, although it was clearly also a bio-lab. It was a place where the illusion of freedom and privacy could be maintained, if need be for years. “I can’t speak more than a handful of words and I suspect that no human will ever be able to do so without massive computer support or surgical alteration, but I’m getting there. I’m building up a dictionary and…”

  “Leave out the specifics,” Alex said. “What about the alien?”

  Jenny waved a hand towards the inner room. Alex followed her gaze. The alien – they still didn’t have a name for the being – sat on one chair, making complicated gestures towards Marilyn, who replied in kind. Alex had seen some gestures used to pass messages between troops when it was dangerous to speak aloud, yet sign language was far more complicated – and expressive. It was easy to believe that they were sharing vast amounts of information.

  “I think they finally made a breakthrough of their own,” Jenny confirmed. The alien looked up, made a slow nodding motion with his great head, and returned to signalling Marilyn. “They’ve been doing that for nearly an hour.”

  Alex watched, impressed. The problem of communicating with an alien life form had been researched long before real aliens arrived, yet theory had suggested that it would be almost impossible. If an alien was truly alien, they might have nothing in common with humanity and no ability to build up a proper shared understanding. The attempts to teach dolphins or chimpanzees to speak had all failed. And yet…the aliens clearly had as much interest in learning to speak to humanity as humanity had in learning to speak to them. It wasn't as if they wanted to remain silent.

  “Good,” he said, finally. “What have they learned?”

  “Quite a bit,” Jenny said. She picked up a sheaf of handwritten notes. “We might finally have an idea about how their society fits together.”

  “Good,” Alex said. He took the first sheet of paper and skimmed through it rapidly. “I think we’re going to need that information.”

  “I’ll have a full briefing for you later,” Jenny assured him. “I just haven’t wanted to disturb those two. Aren’t they sweet together?”

  Alex didn’t bother to reply.

  Chapter Nine

  RAF Machrihanish, United Kingdom

  Day 111

  “Welcome to Torchwood, Prime Minister.”

  Prime Minister Arthur Hamilton scowled at what he considered inappropriate humour. RAF Machrihanish was located a long way from London and coming out without being noticed, even with the massive security clampdown, hadn’t been easy. Jokes about Torchwood and other fictional secret agencies intended to track alien life sounded hollow when faced with the reality. Britain hadn’t been invaded, or even threatened with invasion, yet the country was on the verge of breaking apart. Two days ago, he’d signed an order placing elements of 16 Air Assault Brigade in Bradford, with orders to prevent rioting with lethal force. No Prime Minister had issued such orders for over a hundred years.

  RAF Machri
hanish had an odd history, one that ensured that it was mentioned in numerous conspiracy theories. The base had once been operated by the Americans, before being shared with a civilian operator, and rumours persisted about what might have happened in secret bunkers under the ground. The base had been repossessed completely by the MOD in the wake of the global economic collapse and transformed into a top secret research station, studying alien technology in the hope of developing weapons that could be used to defend Britain, if not liberate the world. The work had to remain a secret. The aliens had punched out NORAD just before the Fall of Washington and RAF Machrihanish’s defences were flimsy in comparison.

  “Thank you,” he said, shaking General Williamson’s hand. The General had seen combat service in Afghanistan, where he’d commanded one of the Forward Operating Bases. He was known as a safe pair of hands for a secret project well away from political oversight. “I understand that you’ve finally gotten the base up and running.”

  Williamson didn’t beat around the bush. “Yes, Prime Minister,” he said. “Torchwood – I’m afraid the name has stuck – is beginning research into two of the three alien craft now. The third has been moved to a secure location where it will be studied by a different team, just in case this base is compromised by the aliens or the press. The American researchers have been a great help, although they did have some access to the craft that crashed in America. The remainder of the researchers are still getting up to speed.”