Outside Context Problem: Book 02 - Under Foot

by Christopher Nuttall

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Washington DC, USA (Occupied)

  Day 180

  Karen found her heart beating rapidly as she walked towards the Order Police station, one hand clutching the authorisation papers she’d produced. Her heartbeat felt so loud in her ears that she was surprised the Order Police couldn’t hear it, or know that she was nervous just by the look on her face. They might have been specially picked to take orders and not ask questions, but her mind refused to believe its own assurances. Only the thought of disappointing the President, and perhaps getting one of his hand-picked people killed, kept her going. It would have been far too easy to just turn and run.

  She’d checked the computers carefully before inserting her own orders and discovered that none of the Walking Dead were anywhere near this particular station, unless they’d somehow managed to drop off the grid. She doubted that any of them would have chosen to do so – the aliens seemed to like knowing where their toys were – but she’d been warned to watch for the unexpected. A Walking Dead man might have questioned her authority – they were completely trusted by the aliens and allowed to ask questions – and then the game would be up. In a bad movie, she kept reminding herself, the heroine would have been able to obtain a grenade to blow herself up if captured, but she hadn’t been able to figure out how to obtain even a single pistol. If she was captured, so much would be lost…

  The Order Police had taken over a building once operated by the Washington PD and turned it into a chamber of horrors. The ordinary citizens still living within Washington had become reluctant to enter a police station on any pretext, knowing that the Order Police could do whatever they liked, provided that they served the aliens. The aliens themselves were almost loved compared to the Order Police, something that Karen suspected was intentional. It wouldn’t be long before humans started turning to the aliens rather than their fellow humans; after all, aliens didn’t rape or molest people who desperately needed their help. The horror served two purposes; breaking humanity’s trust in humanity and their faith in human institutions.

  In the long term, Karen suspected, it would work, for a while. The aliens – and their collaborators – would establish such complete control over the country that no one would be able to do anything without their permission. They might allow humanity to continue to exist on Earth, but only as their slaves, the lowest caste in a caste-based society. Karen had read enough about Ancient India to know what that meant. The lowest of the low – the untouchables – had no hope of rising to the top, or even of obtaining a voice in their society. They were held down by centuries of tradition and the crushing pressure of a religious-based aristocracy.

  Human states that had become fascist or communist hadn’t lasted long – although some had shown extraordinary resilience – and they’d always been outmatched by the democracies. Earth would no longer have any democracies under the aliens; now that they’d taken out Israel, it wouldn’t be long before they turned on Europe, or Russia. Their control and influence wasn't limited by borders – what were human borders to them? They had come for the entire world and they’d have it in the end. Humanity’s crutch – nuclear weapons – hadn’t saved Israel or America. It would have been easy to surrender and serve Daisy for the rest of her life, but somehow she kept going, sending intelligence to the President. It was the least she could do.

  “Your papers,” a voice said. She looked up to see an ugly Order Policeman gazing down at her, his eyes falling to her breasts. She was tempted to point out that her eyes were actually on her face, but there was no point. His superiors probably had to tie his shoelaces for him every morning. “Your papers, now!”

  Karen reached into her pocket and produced her ID card, watching with carefully-concealed amusement as his eyes went wide. He was probably illiterate – or at least she told herself that he was illiterate – but anyone could recognise the gold band wrapped around the card, signifying a Very Important Person indeed. A word from her in the right pair of ears could have him transferred to latrine cleaning duty, or hunting insurgents in the Rocky Mountains, or even dismissed from the Order Police and transferral to a work camp in another city.

  “You can pass,” he said, all the fight draining out of him. “I’m sorry…”

  “Think nothing of it,” Karen said blithely. It was easy now to joke and conceal her inner terror. “It’s good to know that our people are on the alert.”

  She stepped inside the police station and looked around with interest. She’d never seen the inside of any police station, apart from one she’d visited while she’d been in school, and part of her was curious. A line of chairs were filled with handcuffed men and women, some of them looking as if they’d been brutally beaten, while a number of Order Policemen watched them without particular concern. Other chairs held family members, come to bribe their relatives out of jail before they were transferred to a detention camp or a work gang. The Order Police might not have been the most corrupt organisation in human history, but they would certainly give any other organisation a run for its money.

  “Good afternoon,” an Order Police Captain said. His goon at the door must have tipped him off that a VIP was coming in, for he showed no sign of anything, but rapt attention. He had much more to lose than the hired thug at the door. “What can I do for you?”

  “I have a package to collect here,” Karen said, holding up her papers. They were official, in the sense that she’d produced them using the same system that produced actual orders, but too much could go wrong. “Check the papers and then pass it over to me.”

  The Captain knew better than to argue with a person of her authority and waved for one of the Sergeants to take her to the storage room. The package was marked out for her, as she’d ordered, and she checked it quickly, confirming that it was all there. She couldn’t believe her own success and nervously waited for a hand to fall on her shoulder, arresting her, but no one attempted to bar her way out of the police station. She waved at the goon outside, who had been shouting at a pair of little boys for no apparent reason, and walked off down the street. She sagged as soon as she was out of sight and struggled to catch her breath. It had worked!

  Well, partly, she thought, and started to walk again. Washington no longer had any transport apart from official transport, a measure intended to help keep the population under control. Karen could have ordered a car and had a driver transport her to anywhere she wanted to go, but that would have risked Daisy asking questions about what she’d been doing with it. Karen hadn’t been able to think of a good excuse for using an official car, so she walked. Besides, it gave her time to catch her breath and steady her breathing. She felt as if she was on the verge of passing out from hyperventilation.

  A flight of alien craft passed overhead as she walked onwards, heading out towards the Atlantic Ocean. The aliens seemed to have decided to allow the Israelis to clean up their wrecked city before they moved in and occupied the country, something that suggested they intended to make an object lesson of Tel Aviv rather than anything else. The official broadcasts had been very limited, merely noting that Tel Aviv had been destroyed in retaliation for the nuclear destruction of several alien cities and bases, but the internet had been full of horror stories about shattered lives and a ruined city. Karen had known people back in California who would have cheered any thought of Israel suffering, yet even they would have balked at such devastation. The aliens hadn’t needed to provoke or fight the war. They’d done it simply to remind the rest of the world that they could knock over a first-line military and occupy a country any time they chose. The rest of the world would probably do whatever the aliens demanded, just to avoid another invasion.

  She found herself glancing around as she entered a near-deserted area. The aliens – and the collaborator government – had been parcelling out sections of Washington to people who worked for the aliens, assigning abandoned apartments and homes to their servants, regardless of whatever had happened to the original owners. Kare
n felt a moment of sympathy for men and women who’d fled Washington and lost their homes to alien collaborators, before cursing her own mistake under her breath. If she’d fled Washington, perhaps she would have ended up a resistance fighter somewhere in the countryside, rather than a permanently exposed spy under sentence of certain death if – when – they caught her. Or perhaps she would have died when the aliens started their mass counter-insurgency campaign. A slightly different turn of events might have had her in Chicago, if her father had accepted that job offer, years ago…

  The symbol – a flowerpot sitting on top of a dustbin – was where she’d been told it would be. She braced herself as she walked towards the apartment block. She’d known that the President had had other agents in the city, including a pair of resistance fighters who kept putting IEDs in place for the aliens to stumble over, but she knew nothing else about them. She didn’t know names or faces and – she hoped – they knew nothing about her. If she didn’t have to handle it in person…she stepped into the lobby and pulled on the mask she’d obtained from one of the open stores, pulling up her hood to conceal her hair and a pair of gloves. It wasn't a perfect disguise, but there was no other choice. She was the only person who could obtain a pass for the President’s mystery agent.

  She flinched as a voice spoke from above her. “Mata?”

  “Hari,” she replied. “Are you Flypaper?”

  “Bluebottle,” the man said. She saw him beckoning her up the stairs, lowering a stubby gun as he did so. He’d been prepared to shoot her at once if she gave the wrong answer. “Is this building safe?”

  “It hasn’t been assigned to anyone yet,” Karen said, carefully. The man looked every inch a soldier, nothing like any of the Order Policemen she’d seen. She had no doubt that he would die to complete his mission. Masked and gloved, he was far more intimidating than anyone else she’d ever seen. “I’ll assign it to our friend upstairs and no one should decide to visit.”

  “One can only hope,” the soldier agreed. “Come on.”

  The apartment looked as if it had once belonged to a teenager in his mid-twenties, decorated with science-fiction posters and several collectable plates. The looters hadn’t been through before the aliens and the Order Police had secured the area, for several valuable computers and other items had been left in the apartment. There was a roaring trade going on in the black market for looted items stolen from abandoned buildings, often owned and operated by the Order Police. Karen had been offered enough jewellery to outfit a heavy metal band by one of the other collaborators, who’d had designs on her body. The thought reminded her of Jasmine and she shivered inwardly. She couldn’t tell her friend about her work for the President. In many ways, the relationship only served to underline how alone she truly was.

  “Hi,” a voice said. She looked up to see a teenager and thought, for a moment, that the owner of the flat had somehow managed to remain hidden in it ever since the invasion. “I’m Robert Nguyen. I am very pleased to meet you.”

  “No names,” the soldier hissed, angrily. “Not here, not now!”

  “Sorry, boss,” the teenager said. Karen rolled her eyes inwardly, grateful for the uncomfortable mask. “Are you the…?”

  “I’m from the Order Police,” Karen lied. Hopefully, if Nguyen were to be captured, it would mislead any investigators. “I’m here to register you as a citizen of Washington.” She opened her bag and sat down at the table. “This is a registration process that will add you to the official system. I’ve diddled the computer records a little and every department will think that you belong to another department. There’s enough competition between the various departments to make it hard for anyone to track down precisely what you’re meant to be doing.”

  “How very human of them,” Nguyen commented. “And what if they do catch me?”

  Karen didn’t bother to lie. “You’ll go right into a detention camp and never see the light of day again,” she said, flatly. “If you’re really unlucky, they’ll take you into one of their operating rooms and transform you into one of the Walking Dead. I want you to remain in this flat unless you have absolutely no choice, but to leave. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes,” Nguyen said. He looked a little more subdued now. Karen lifted up the registering device and held it in front of his face, capturing an image of his features for the ID card. The alien technology was far more precise than anything humans had ever built along the same lines, making it harder to fool than human tech. Karen suspected that once the aliens had started to produce more of their technology on Earth, they’d cover the cities with cameras and track every human on the planet, wherever they would go. “How does that thing work?”

  Karen held up the image of his face. “Far too well,” she said. Nguyen would have been cute if he didn’t have the indefinable attitude of knowing far more than she did. “Give me your fingers.”

  She pressed his fingers against the sensor and waited nervously. Nguyen shouldn’t have been on the system at all, but if he had been registered and somehow forgotten to inform anyone, the game was up. The mainframe would realise that it was being diddled and sound the alert. The chime when the system accepted his fingerprints as being new and unique almost made her faint with relief. All she had to do now was complete the process and she could leave and get back to the Green Zone.

  “All right,” she said, as she passed the card through the machine and allowed it to complete production. “This is your ID card. Do not lose it. There is a steep fine under normal circumstances for losing it, but in your case they might realise that there is something odd about it and start asking the wrong questions. I’ve constructed a legend around you that should stand up to casual scrutiny, yet if they push at it too hard, they might realise that you’re not supposed to be in the city at all.”

  She looked up at the soldier, and then back at Nguyen. “I’ve cleared you for basic rations and food packs as well, which should keep you fed,” she continued. “I’d advise that you don’t go to any of the communal food kitchens and eat with the civilian population. Someone might realise that they’d never seen you before and report you to the Order Police, who will start asking questions about where you came from. I’ve put some vague notations in your file about special duties and shit like that, but believe me, it won’t stand up to a thorough investigation. Don’t get caught.”

  “I won’t,” Nguyen said. She was relieved to see that he looked a bit less sure of himself now. “How do I get in touch with you if I need help?”

  “You don’t,” Karen and the soldier said together.

  “But…”

  He trailed off under her glare, even through the mask. “You don’t try to find me, you don’t try to identify me and you don’t have anything to do with me,” Karen said, firmly. “If you need help from anyone, drop an email to the emergency server and let them take care of it. If we see each other again, it will probably be in a transport taking us both to our final resting place. Good luck.”

  She stood up, packed up the device, and put it back in her bag. “A final word of warning,” she added. “Be very careful. This isn’t like anywhere else in the world. The aliens and Order Police are crawling over the entire city. You can’t go a block in places without being asked for your ID card. Don’t let it get to you. Just remain calm and trust in the system.” She grinned. “It’s working for you.”

  “Thank you,” Nguyen said. “I won’t let you down.”

  He was already setting up his system when she waved goodbye and headed out of the apartment and onto the street, pausing only to take off the mask and dump it in her bag. She’d drop it in the incinerator later and get rid of that piece of evidence. She hoped that Nguyen would be safe in the apartment – she’d rigged the computers to show that he had the right to stay there, but if someone decided to loot it, what could he do? Everything depended on chance now…chance, and no one questioning what was in the computer files. If they questioned the data…

  She reminded hers
elf that no one in the Order Police was trained to question the data and walked home. She’d done everything she could. The rest was in the hands of God.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Area 52, Nevada, USA

  Day 181

  “He’s in,” Santini said. “We got an email from Robert this morning. He’s successfully penetrated the alien security system and is currently exploring their system.”

  “And thank God for that,” Alex said, relieved. He’d seriously considered vetoing sending anyone into Occupied Washington, even with help from a source high up in the Order Police. Nguyen didn’t know anything that would reveal the location of Area 52, but he knew too much to be risked, at least in his opinion. The President had disagreed. “Maybe it’ll all work out and we’ll learn what we need to know to beat them.”

  Jane Hatchery nodded tightly. “We may have learned enough about their society to start looking for weaknesses,” she said. “We have finally prepared a report on what we have learned from our alien captive.”

  “It’s about time,” Alex said, dryly. “You’ve only been promising the data for…oh, the last month or so.”

  “I know,” Jane admitted. “The problem is that we have only limited communication with the captive – we’re still not sure what his name, rank and serial number is – and Jenny refused to sign her name to anything until she could swear that it was as accurate as she could make it. A translation mishap now could have disastrous consequences later down the line.”

  “True,” Alex agreed. “What do you have for us?”

  “A security nightmare,” Jane admitted. “Alex, if any of this data is released and the aliens realise that we have it, they’ll know that we have a captive. There’s no way we could have obtained the data without successfully capturing and interrogating one of their people. They’ll certainly start searching for the missing pilot at once.”