Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Alex scowled. The alien captive might have been talking, but not everything he’d said – or signed – had made sense, although he was sure that they were just missing the key that would unlock the entire secret. Perhaps they’d killed off enough alien Leaders to upset the rest of the aliens, or perhaps they hadn’t killed off enough…there was no way to know. The relations between the different castes of aliens seemed to change completely, dependent on the exact situation. He was sure they could work out how to use that against the aliens, if they learned to understand it…

  “Getting into the system remains the priority,” Alex said, finally. “What’s the catch?”

  “The craft we have here – and the other crashed ships – are no longer linked into the system,” Nguyen said. “That’s lucky for us. If they had been, the aliens would have had no trouble in tracking the ships down and recovering them. The problem is that we can’t use them to get into the alien computer system. We don’t think we could repair the system, even if we dared try. We need to get into the system from somewhere else.”

  “I knew there was a catch,” Alex said, rubbing his head. The headache hadn’t faded away. “We can’t get you into one of the alien ships, Robert…”

  “I wouldn’t want to be in an area they controlled completely,” Nguyen admitted. “There should be a command node in Washington, where they have their collaborator government set up, even with the crashed ship. It should be possible to get close enough to hack into the system without being detected and tossed out, or arrested. There may be closer command nodes, but the best chance of finding one is in Washington, or their cities.”

  “Which are very secure,” Alex concluded. The aliens had not only been driving humans away from their homes, but embarking on a scorched earth policy to keep them away. Resistance armies did what they could to hinder the aliens, yet none of it was enough to slow them down. “You do realise that you can’t hop in an aeroplane and fly to Washington these days? You’d be talking about at least a week’s hard travel, probably longer – hell, almost certainly longer. How close would you have to be to the…ah, command node to hack into it?”

  “It depends on how much wireless bandwidth they’re generating,” Nguyen admitted. “I’d certainly have to be inside the encircled area of the city, although I don’t think I’d have to be inside the Green Zone.”

  “That’s not much of a consolation,” Alex said, sharply. “Robert, Washington is under very tight control. Everyone in the city has to have an ID card and be registered within the alien system.” He held up a hand before Nguyen could interrupt. “I know; sooner or later, you’ll figure out how to add details and get people registered or unregistered as you please. For now, if the Order Police stopped you, you’d be arrested and taken away. If you were lucky, you’d be dumped in a detention camp and put to work. If you were unlucky, you’d be tortured until you told them everything they wanted to know, including telling them about the existence of this base.”

  “I don’t know where in California we are,” Nguyen protested. The Tiger Team had all been told, apart from a handful of the senior leaders, that Area 52 was in California. If any of them were captured, it was hoped that it would misdirect the aliens enough to save the base. “I couldn’t direct them anywhere!”

  Alex shook his head. “You’d be able to tell them a great deal about this base,” he warned. “You’d certainly be able to tell them that we were on the verge of learning to break into their computers. You shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near them. I’m sorry…”

  Nguyen glared at him. “You sent soldiers into harm’s way before and some of them got killed,” he protested. “Why can’t you send me on a much safer mission?”

  “The soldiers all volunteered and, at bottom, they were expendable,” Alex snapped, hating himself for even thinking it. “They knew the risks. You don’t understand the risks and you are far from expendable. We cannot let you go until you’ve shared everything you know or have deduced about the alien system, and even then, we couldn’t run the risk of you becoming one of the Walking Dead.”

  “We could free them if we could figure out how to hack into and deactivate their implants,” Nguyen snapped. “We could learn that from their computer systems, but we have to hack into them before it occurs to them that we could hack into them and they start improving their security. We don’t have time to hesitate!”

  Alex considered. “Couldn’t we put your device near the command node and operate it through the Internet?”

  “No,” Nguyen said. “I thought of that, but we wouldn’t have enough Internet connectivity to operate it at a distance. Even the heavy trunk lines the government built for nuclear war would be insufficient to handle the expected traffic – and then, the security systems they do have might realise that we were up to something we shouldn’t be. I can fake that” – he pointed to the laptop – “as part of their communications system, but not another part of our internet. I need to be there in person. There’s no one else who could do it without extensive training.”

  Alex held up a hand. “I’ll consider the matter,” he said. “I’ll have to consult with others who might have their own concerns, or thoughts on how the mission could best be accomplished. I don’t think that it’s a good idea, but I won’t rule it out completely.”

  “Nuts,” Nguyen said. “Does that mean you’re going to say no in the end?”

  “I'm going to run it past the people in charge of the resistance in Washington,” Alex said, firmly. “They’ll have the final say on the issue. I think they’ll have links in Washington that can be exploited, but…they may not want to risk them. We’ll see, ok?”

  He watched Nguyen leaving the office, carrying his strange device in one hand, and looked down at the newspaper in his hands. Only five copies had been printed out on the base – paper supplies, like everything else, had to be conserved – and they were passed around every hour. The newspaper ranted and raved about the endless war in Chicago, shouting about atrocities and how badly the Arabs treated the local population, while the resistance resisted heroically. The official news broadcasts, for once, said pretty much the same, except the heroes and villains were reversed. He wanted to sit back with a cup of coffee – something else that had to be conserved – and read it all, but there was no time. He looked at the cartoon on the last page, drawn by a famous artist who had had to go into hiding, and smiled bitterly. It showed a dark-skinned elf stabbing an alien warrior in the chest, followed by a three-headed monster eating its way through a stream of alien leaders. It would have been funny if it weren’t so tragic.

  “Get me the direct link to the President,” he ordered. Only one person could authorise sending Nguyen into Washington. “Tell him that we might have had a real breakthrough.”

  He ran through a quick explanation and waited for the President’s response. “I’ll consult with others and get back to you,” the President said. “Make the preparations anyway. We may be able to get him into somewhere closer than the encircled cities.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chicago, USA (Occupied)

  Day 150

  “Keep your heads down,” the guide advised. “There are snipers watching for the slightest hint of weakness.”

  Abigail nodded and followed his advice. She was wearing a set of body armour and a helmet, but she had no illusions as to how effective they would be if someone took it into their mind to take a shot at her. A sniper with a military-grade sniper rifle or even a hunting rifle could splatter her brains all over the streets, along with the other reporters and observers. The Order Policemen escorting them looked nervous, gripping their weapons as if they were lucky talismans and for once she was grateful for their presence. They’d draw fire away from her.

  Chicago, the sections that had been ‘liberated,’ looked considerably worse for wear. It was worse than the part of Washington that had been destroyed when the massive alien ship came down on top of it, for it was completely unnecessary. Buildings had be
en damaged, or destroyed and left as piles of rubble or blackened ruins. Dead bodies lay everywhere, causing a health hazard. Drainpipes and sewer tunnels lay exposed to the air, pushing a vile stench towards their delicate noses. A handful of prisoners were engaged in clearing up the dead bodies and transporting them to a mass grave outside the city – rumour had it that the aliens intended to feed the human bodies to their warriors, although honesty compelled her to admit that it was only a rumour, if one repeated enough to make people believe in it – while conscripted doctors and nurses worked on the wounded. There was no difference between a wounded American and a wounded Arab. They both looked terrible.

  If this is liberation, she thought, I’d hate to see occupation. The resistance still held over half the city and was fighting savagely to bleed the Arabs as much as possible. The briefings they’d been given had all been sweetness and light, promising that there was no danger from a handful of isolated holdouts, but everyone knew better. The sound of shooting still echoed out over the city, joined by mortars, bombs and random explosions as one booby-trap or another was triggered. The entire ‘secured’ area of the city was still a dangerous maze loaded with traps; she’d heard that the Arabs had taken to shooting at anything suspicious from a distance, hoping to set the IED off before it could harm them. Prisoners had sometimes hidden grenades on their person and used them against their captors; the dying had booby-trapped their own bodies in hopes that their deaths would still serve America. A week of hard fighting had cost the Arabs dearly and many thousands of them would never see home again. Those that did go home, if the aliens allowed them to go home, would be forever scarred by the experience. They had had no experience in fighting such a determined foe. The idea of picking up and checking every person in the zone had been replaced by the desperate struggle to survive. She didn’t want to even think about how many civilians had been killed in the fighting.

  A handful of the Arabs spoke English and she’d listened to their horror stories. They’d spoken of sentries being garrotted and grenades being tossed into their sleeping quarters at night, or of women luring them out of formation and then sticking a knife between their ribs, or fleeing collapsing buildings before they were buried under the rubble. Several of them had drunk bottles of alcohol they’d found, only to discover that they’d drunk pure alcohol or methanol and, at the very least, they’d been blinded. The aliens could help the blind to see again, yet they didn’t seem to care about the Arabs. The wounded were shipped out and no one had ever seen them again. It hadn’t been hard to quietly suggest that perhaps the wounded were simply dumped in a mass grave and left to die. The aliens certainly didn’t seem interested in providing medical care to their sepoy troops.

  Another shot rang out, much closer, and she winced inwardly. The Order Police jumped and looked around, their eyes searching out possible targets. Abigail followed their gaze, but saw nothing, apart from a bullet-ridden plastic bottle lying on the ground. One of the policemen pointed an AK-47 at it and blasted the bottle to little pieces, shredding it beyond repair. It took her a moment to realise why and then she found herself fighting to keep a smile off her face. They’d thought that the bottle was an IED. Without the looming presence of the aliens, the resistance would rapidly destroy the Order Police and the Arabs, if they stayed around to fight. The only thing keeping more of the Arab soldiers from deserting was the fact that the resistance had no interest in taking prisoners. Arabs who were caught alone ended up dead, with their balls cut off and stuffed into their mouths. It was a merciless war on both sides. It didn’t help that the resistance had uncovered someone who spoke Arabic and used him to bellow out warnings about the aliens, or their own leaders, to the advancing Arab soldiers. Morale was on the brink of collapse.

  She looked back as another Bradley rumbled up behind them. Their minders urged them to get out of the way, allowing the vehicle to head further into the city. The Bradley vehicles had been deployed by the Order Police and the Arabs – they’d originally been stored in an army base not too far away – and used against the resistance, but at least forty of them had been destroyed in the fighting. It was hard to get accurate figures because half of the Arabs didn’t seem able to count, but she’d counted the burned-out wreckage she’d seen. The Arab figures, taken without any care, suggested that more vehicles had been destroyed than had ever existed, although she would have been the first to admit that she had no idea how many Bradley AFVs had been built. The death figures were equally questionable. If they were all taken on face value, the entire population of the city would have been exterminated, several times over. The continued fighting suggested otherwise.

  The fighting had even spread into the suburbs and outside the city proper. Rumour had it that someone had used a light aircraft to bomb an Order Police base, releasing thousands of prisoners in a single devastating raid. Abigail would have loved to believe that rumour, but it didn’t seem possible, not when the aliens had wiped out the USAF in two weeks of hard fighting. How could a civilian aircraft have outdone the entire USAF, armed with the most modern and advanced fighters in the world? The resistance had attacked Arab bases and Order Police barracks, hitting them constantly and forcing them to divert resources to tracking down and eliminating the so-called bandits. They’d been promising that Chicago would fall any day now, but judging from the ongoing fighting, Abigail was sure that the city would be holding out for another few weeks, unless the aliens lost patience and brought up their own craft and warriors in support. By the time the fighting ended, there would be nothing left of Chicago, but rubble.

  She turned to watch as another line of Arab soldiers returned from the front lines, a vague concept in urban fighting. They didn’t look happy, but tired and dispirited, as if they expected the sky to fall in at any moment. They didn’t notice the women among the reporters, or anything else, they just walked on as if they were already asleep. They needed at least a week out of the fighting and probably some consoling, she decided. They’d be lucky to get a single night’s sleep. One of the resistance’s nastier tricks had been to deploy noise-makers near the Arab barracks and wake them up constantly, using sleep deprivation to mess with their minds. The results had been mixed. Some Arabs had gone back to the fight feeling murderous, others had had a set of nervous breakdowns…and some had ended up firing on other Arabs. The chaos that had resulted had stalled the advance for a day before the rogue unit was finally eliminated. Nothing of that, of course, had been allowed into the official record.

  Abigail smiled tightly. The collaborator government had picked the wrong person to head the propaganda department and it showed. Americans were suckers for subtle propaganda, but blatant propaganda was too easy to demolish and use against the people who’d produced it. She’d recorded hundreds of interviews with actors who played civilians caught up in the war zone and faithfully recorded their stories, all the while using positioning and contrast to hint that they were lying. Few of the stories had any basis in reality, which helped. She didn’t know who’d been watching and approving her recordings, but they had no sense of the ironic. She was convincing hundreds of people that the collaborators were lying through their teeth.

  She glanced down at her watch. Her ‘interview’ with the senior minder was coming up, an interview that she knew would include something more than just talking. The collaborators had been so pleased with them that several of the reporters were going to be assigned to even more important positions, if they made it through the vetting process. Abigail had no illusions about that either. The minders were fond of abusing their power over the reporters, particularly the young and attractive reporters. This time, however, it would be different.

  Another string of explosions echoed out as an advancing patrol triggered a buried mine, or perhaps a concealed IED. She braced herself to drop to the pavement as the shooting seemed to grow louder for a second and then faded away again. The Order Police were shoeing the reporters back towards the rear areas and safety, ironically proving that the
city was hardly as safe as they claimed. The thought made her smile bitterly. The world was far from safe these days, for anyone.

  ***

  Dolly braced herself as the timer reached zero, drawing her pistol and taking off the safety. She’d been hidden for over four hours under the tarpaulin, risking her life and more to end up behind the advancing front lines, but the gamble had paid off. The Arabs who’d searched the building hadn’t done so thoroughly at all. An American platoon would almost certainly have found her, but the Arabs only interest was in surviving and returning home to their families. They hadn’t wanted to search too thoroughly because they might have discovered an IED and been killed. The thought made her smile. A handful of empty plastic bottles scattered around, she’d been told, had delayed the enemy more than rigged buildings and snipers.

  She peeked out from under the cover and relaxed as she realised she was alone. It had been unlikely that the Arabs would use the building as a billet, but it had been a possibility and the last thing she wanted to do was to present them with something young and female. A handful of women in the resistance had been raped when they’d been captured and the remainder had been warned never to let themselves fall alive into enemy hands. She checked across the rooftop and saw nothing out of place, but she kept her head low anyway. A skilful enemy might have hidden another sniper on a nearby rooftop, or maybe even scattered a few sensors around to watch for trouble. It was the curse of dealing with alien technology. There was no way to know where the limits actually were.

  The edge of the rooftop hadn’t been touched either, although it was obvious to her that it had been intended as a sniper’s nest. She crawled into it and peered down towards the ground. Arab soldiers milled around, but none of them were clearly officers or other vital targets. Some of the resistance fighters shot at doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, but Dolly had refused to do anything of the sort. The doctors and nurses had been pressed into service by the enemy, rather than being willing collaborators or Walking Dead. They weren’t legal targets in her book and she had refused to treat them as enemy soldiers. The resistance leadership hadn’t pressed the point. Dolly was one of the best civilian snipers they had and they needed her. She checked her rifle, ensured that the weapon was loaded, and settled down to wait.