Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  He waved a hand at the other two people in the hangar. “Doctor Syeda Bihide, Chief Scientist, and Tony Jones, on special assignment from the President of America,” he said, introducing them. The Prime Minister shook their hands in turn. Syeda was a short dark-skinned woman with bright brown eyes; Tony Jones was older, with the first traces of grey hair at his temples. If he had been assigned to the UK by President Chalk, he would be extremely competent and loyal. The President was not known for tolerating fools or people who were willing to subvert American policy for their own interests. “We have prepared a short tour of the base for you so that we can introduce you to the departmental heads. If you’ll come with me…?”

  The Prime Minister followed him deeper into the hangar, passing a black aircraft that remained half-hidden inside the hangar, and into the elevator. RAF Machrihanish might not have looked like much from high above – although it had the longest runway in the UK – but the complex underground was much more impressive. There were secret hangars, training bunkers and even a complete biological research lab, all top secret. Rumours had been leaking out for years, hence the decision to close down most of the activities at the base following the end of the Cold War, yet few researchers had guessed the truth. RAF Machrihanish had once been Britain’s Area 51.

  “I understand that there have been some issues with security,” he said, as the elevator doors hissed closed and the small chamber began to descend. “What’s your current situation look like?”

  The General paused to gather his thoughts. “We’ve attracted some interest from the local community, Prime Minister,” he said. “They knew that the civilian airfield had been shut down and they’ve believed for years that we had more here than we ever publicly admitted to having. We’ve been quietly encouraging the local police to move on tourists and have involved D-Notices and other such laws to discourage the media from picking up on the interest, even to the point of interfering with internet access. I don’t believe that any of it presents a serious threat, but we will keep an eye on it and prepare for the worst.

  “About the aliens…we have soldiers here with handheld SAM missiles and other weapons, but if they decide they want to come and take the base, we’re screwed,” he added. “We couldn’t deploy Patriot or Rapier missile launchers to Machrihanish without drawing their attention and warning them that we had something here we considered worth defending. This base doesn’t have a fighter CAP or any additional defences, although the bunkers should provide some protection if we are attacked. We’ve been very careful about what we do here to avoid attracting their attention.”

  The Prime Minister nodded bitterly. The disastrous Blair and Brown Governments were long over, but their legacy remained in almost every field. They’d encouraged the development of the Eurofighter and other advanced weapons systems, while cutting costs elsewhere in a desperate attempt to balance the budget. Iraq and Afghanistan had taught politicians the folly of that decision and money had been – eventually – redirected to the British Army and its supporting elements, rather than the RAF or ground-based SHORAD units. The irony was chilling. The defenders of Britain didn’t have enough weapons and equipment to cover even the most vital sectors. Machrihanish might be the most vital sector of all, yet they didn’t even dare defend the base for fear of alerting the aliens.

  “I understand,” he said, as the lift came to a halt. “And the scientists?”

  “The Yanks are settling in reasonably well, although many of them miss their families,” Williamson confirmed. The American Government, in the final days of the war, had launched a program to get as many first-class scientists and researchers out of the country as possible, but in all the confusion not all of them had escaped with their families. There was little hope of convincing the aliens to allow their families to leave America, if they even wanted to go. “The Resistance movement in America will try to rescue as many as possible, but it won’t be easy to smuggle them out. Transatlantic shipping has fallen to a new low. What little there is coming out isn’t always that useful.”

  He didn’t go into details and the Prime Minister didn’t press him. “There’s also the political issue,” Syeda said, speaking for the first time. Her voice held a strong flavour of Lancashire, suggesting that she’d been born and bred there. “Many of the vetted and cleared scientists we brought here from the mainland have been angry at their American counterparts for not sharing the details of the crashed ship earlier. There have been some discussions that have developed into fights. There’s a limit to how many people we can bring to this base and they…well, pretty much every scientist on this base knows someone who would be really helpful, if only they could be vetted and cleared.”

  “The decision to maintain secrecy was made by the President,” Jones said. He sounded tired and defeated, as if he’d already given up all hope. It couldn’t be easy, the Prime Minister realized, to know that one’s homeland was lost, perhaps permanently. “None of the scientists on this base knew about the crashed ship until it was revealed to the world by the aliens.”

  “Leave it for the moment,” the Prime Minister ordered. They had come to a vast set of doors. At a muttered command from Williamson, the doors started to swing open, revealing a single alien craft sitting within a framework holding it off the ground. The Prime Minister studied it with interest. He’d seen an alien craft before, when the aliens had visited Britain weeks ago, but a crashed ship was different. Even the obvious damage to the craft’s rear didn’t detract from its eerie beauty. It seemed to shimmer, taunting the humans with its silent perfection. “My God.”

  “I doubt that God had much to do with this ship,” Williamson said. “This craft might be repairable if we knew how to repair it – it certainly seems to be more intact than the other two craft. We have research teams concentrating on duplicating the American successes at Area 52 and hopefully expanding into whole new areas. We may have had a breakthrough.”

  The Prime Minister glanced over at him. The General’s face looked odd in the reflected light from the alien craft. “Something we can use against them?”

  “I think so,” the General said. “If you’ll come with me…?”

  The General’s office was small and cramped. The Prime Minister liked it at once, even though the chairs were uncomfortable and the poster on the wall – an image of a tall man wearing a trenchcoat, with a line asking WHO would save the human race – was frankly disturbing. The General poured a generous glass of Scotch for the Prime Minister and Jones; Syeda had a small glass of water. The Prime Minister had never been much of a drinker, yet he had to admit that the Scotch was top quality. The General’s family owned a distillery up in Scotland.

  “The aliens are not gods,” Williamson said, once they were all comfortable. “They have more advanced technology, sure. They can do things we can’t, yet their technology is based on principles we understand or can come to understand. There’s no magic in what they do.”

  “As others have pointed out,” the Prime Minister said. “Can we deploy new hardware in time to prevent them from invading Britain?”

  “Perhaps,” Williamson said. “We may not be able to duplicate everything they do just yet, but we do have some ideas that were prompted by their technology. They taught us how to produce, in effect, excellent batteries, which are really just systems to store energy. Combined with some of our tech, we can actually discharge that energy in a single burst.” He grinned. “It would make one hell of a weapon.”

  The Prime Minister considered it. “Would it be effective against the alien craft?”

  Syeda rubbed the back of her head. “Yes and no, Prime Minister,” she said. “The aliens deployed a plasma cannon-like weapon against the USAF. It fired bolts of plasma that destroyed whatever they hit, yet they didn’t move at light speed and could be evaded by a skilled pilot. Our new weapon would move at light speed. By the time the aliens knew that they were under fire, they’d have been hit.”

  “The downside is that we don’t know
for sure just what effect the weapons would have,” Williamson added. “The alien drive fields, we believe, absorb energy and only fail when too much energy is pumped in, overloading the field. The craft we have here all have fused drive systems, although we are following up several promising theories and may be able to unlock the mystery of how to build them for ourselves. We don’t know if we can hit them hard enough to knock out even one of their fighter craft – but they will certainly know that they’ve been fired upon.”

  “It sounds more promising than anything else,” the Prime Minister said. “How long would it be until you can produce a test version?”

  Williamson looked uncomfortable. “At least two months, Prime Minister,” he said. “The…well, we used to draw a great deal of equipment and technology from the United States and that is no longer available to us. Our own tech base is advanced, but the Americans were right at the cutting edge of the possible. We might have to make the tools to make the tools to make the weapons and it could take years. It would also have no rational purpose other than fighting the aliens.”

  “Perhaps convincing them to hit us before we hit them,” the Prime Minister said.

  “Precisely,” Williamson agreed. “There’s also the issue of moving on to mass production. That could take years.”

  The Prime Minister winced. Despite desperate efforts and a level of governmental control that would have been unthinkable before the invasion, the British economy was sliding down the slippery slope to disaster. The loss of the United States had seriously damaged the economy and the knock-on effects had wiped out tens of thousands of jobs. The rest of Europe was in the same condition, although some of them had it even worse. The news out of France was growing darker every day. Germany was staggering under the twin blows of economic collapse and racial unrest, while to the east Russia waited and bided her time. China had collapsed into a sinkhole of civil war, fighting a savage multi-sided conflict…there would be no help from there.

  “Give it the highest priority,” he ordered, harshly. They’d have to produce the weapons. There was no other choice. “What else is there?”

  He listened to a brief outline of the ongoing research program, but there was little else that was truly new. The alien craft were still largely unexplored, although teams were digging into every aspect of the ships and distributing knowledge around the base. The workings of the alien FTL system remained a mystery, although one theoretical physicist had produced an elegant theory explaining how the alien craft were able to move faster than light. The alien plasma weapon had been extensively studied, but all of the teams had concluded that even if they duplicated the weapon, it would do them no good. The alien craft had hit each other during the big air battles, without taking any damage at all. Their drive fields had simply absorbed the hits.

  “Thank you,” he said, finally. There was one question that still nagged at him…and it was unlikely that he’d ever see President Chalk again. “Mr Jones…why did the President insist on keeping the crashed UFO a secret?”

  Jones looked down at the clean floor. “There were several different reasons,” he said. “We didn’t know what we were dealing with, so the President wanted to get a handle on it before we brought in the rest of the world. We wanted to know just what the aliens were doing and how they’d slipped so close to secure airspace without being detected. We thought…we thought that the rest of the world would declare war if they ever realised that we had the craft, or demand access to any research program. It wasn't that foolish a concern. An economic embargo would have crippled the global economy.”

  “And you wanted the United States to have first crack at a faster-than-light drive system,” the Prime Minister said, without rancour. He would have done the same thing if the situation were reversed. “And yet, you kept information about a threat to the entire planet to yourself…”

  Jones looked up at him. “There’s a story I read once, while I was growing up,” he said. “I forgot the title, but the story stuck with me afterwards. There’s this planet that is in desperate need of medical supplies from Earth and so a spaceship was dispatched to carry the supplies to the colony. The problem is that fuel is so expensive that every single ounce has to be finely calculated and there is no spare fuel. A single gram of extra weight on a spacecraft would ensure disaster.”

  His voice hardened. “The fuel is so expensive that pirates try to hijack the ships frequently and that means that they have to kill the pilot, because otherwise there would be too much mass and the ship would crash. The pilots can’t show any mercy to hijackers either – it’s kill or be killed – so when one pilot realises that there’s a stowaway on his ship, he heads off to kill him. Except it’s a her, and she’s a young girl who wanted to visit her brother on the colony. She’s an innocent.

  “Don’t you see my point? The girl didn’t know anything about the fuel, or the fact that her mere presence ensures that the craft will crash when it tries to land, dooming the colony. The universe doesn’t care that she boarded the ship with innocent motives. The cold equations apply to her as much as they do to the pilot, or the pirates, or everyone else. She has to die for the sake of everyone else. It doesn’t matter if the pilot kills her or if she walks out of the airlock. She has to die!

  “The President didn’t know about the mothership, or the aliens, or everything else we know now. It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d told the entire world or not – a month afterwards, the mothership would have arrived at Earth anyway. We wondered…one of the scenarios the analysts came up with was a suggestion that the aliens had meant us to discover the craft, in hopes of triggering off World War Three and removing any human threat. We kept it to ourselves because we wanted to prevent global chaos. If we’d known what was coming, perhaps we would have made a different call, but we made the best call we could with what we knew at the time.”

  The Prime Minister nodded slowly. “And the girl?”

  Jones blinked. “She says goodbye to her brother – the poor bastard – and walks out of the airlock, taking responsibility for her own actions,” he said. He grimaced at the thought. “It doesn’t matter. She still had to die. What other choice did she have?”

  He shrugged. “That’s why you got the craft here,” he added. “The President hoped that you could use them to develop weapons that could be turned against the aliens before they finish devouring us and move on to you. What other choice do we have?”

  Chapter Ten

  Chicago, USA (Occupied)

  Day 111

  Edward Tanaka tensed, one hand on his concealed pistol, as he stepped through the lobby and into the deserted apartment complex. It had clearly been abandoned in a hurry and it showed. Broken bags, forgotten clothing and toys and bundles of rubbish littered the floor. He almost drew his weapon as he sighted what looked like a dead child on the ground, before realising that it was actually a walking-talking doll, made up to look like a five-year-old girl. He’d been warned to come alone, yet he would have killed to have someone at his back. Walking into a possible trap wasn't wise.

  His gaze sharpened as he read the message on the wall. Anyone else who wasn't a Marine wouldn’t have recognised that there was a message at all, but he’d been trained to look for messages in odd places. It provided directions to one of the apartment complexes, thankfully on the ground floor. The upper floors would be far too easy for any enemy force to block off and trap everyone who came to the meeting. He slipped along a darkened corridor, still clutching his pistol, and relaxed slightly as he encountered the second sign. He pulled his balaclava over his face, concealing his identity, and opened the door. A figure stepped out of the darkness and pointed a pistol directly at his face.

  “Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light…”

  “Not while the evil days come not,” Ed countered. The obvious response would have earned him a pistol shot in the face. The figure stepped back and beckoned him into the darkened room, revealing three other figures wearing masks of their own.
It galled him that he didn’t know who they were – even though one of them was clearly a Marine like him – although he did understand the need for security. The aliens didn’t play fair. If they captured him, they’d convert him into one of the Walking Dead and he’d spend the rest of his life serving them as a loyal slave. “All present and correct?”

  “Don’t get smart,” the sole woman said. Edward thought of her as the Bitch Queen. She wore a garment that revealed nothing beyond her femininity, as if it protected her from the world. Perhaps it did; but the aliens wouldn’t hesitate to treat her as badly as a man, if they caught her. “Show me your eyes.”

  Ed locked eyes with her for a long second. The Internet had been full of advice on how to detect one of the Walking Dead. They might have looked normal, but their eyes seemed dull and dead. The longer one spent with them, he’d been told, the more obvious it became that something was very wrong. She nodded and looked at the next man. Ed did the same. If one of them had been captured and converted, a hundred alien warriors might be on the verge of breaking into the apartment and capturing them all.

  “This room is secure and has been checked,” the Bitch Queen said, finally. Ed shrugged. They might be able to clear out human-designed surveillance systems, but no one knew what an alien listening device would look like, or if it could be detected. It stood to reason that such an advanced society would have advanced methods of keeping a covert eye on people. “However, we will not remain here for long.”

  “What a shame,” one of the other men said. Edward thought of him as Muscles. He looked like an insane bodybuilder, or perhaps someone who had taken too many steroids. “We could have had a hand of rummy before we went back to our wives and daughters.”

  “Quiet,” the second man said. He and his companion – Edward thought of them as Pinkie and The Brain – scowled at Muscles. “The longer we remain here, the greater the chance that a roving patrol will pick us up. I hardly need to remind you how disastrous that would be. What do you have for us?”