He keyed his radio. “Sir, we took down three of four hostiles,” he said. “The fourth hostile may have decided to bolt, or may be back.”
“Understood,” the CO said. “Hold your positions and wait.”
Edward looked back down towards the tantalising gateway into the alien base. Now that the hologram had vanished completely, he could see the interior of the alien base and the damaged alien fighters. He was tempted to go down and stare into the unknown, but training and discipline held him in place. The CO was depending on the Force Recon Marines to keep their exit open and allow them to escape. The bug-out order meant that there was no hope of taking and keeping the base. The aliens were probably mobilising already to counter the unexpected threat. How long would it take them to bring reinforcements in from the mothership?
He was throwing himself to the ground before he even realised that they were under attack. A pair of alien fighters had raced by at low-level, strafing the ground and shooting up every human they could see. A MANPAD team on the other side of the base was wiped out before it could fire back at the fighters, or dive for cover. The alien craft lanced around and vanished as another crew fired a Stinger at them, forcing the Stinger to burn itself out and come crashing back to the ground. Edward guessed that they would circle around and come in again, before launching another series of attacks. If they went after the transports instead of the assault force itself, they might prevent the assault force from escaping, leaving them to freeze to death in the cold.
“They’re coming back,” someone shouted over the radio. “There are three of them now!”
Edward recognised the larger almond-shaped craft in the middle of their formation and braced himself. The alien fighters didn’t seem to be capable of tracking individual human soldiers – or maybe the uniforms they wore were working perfectly and they had hardly any infrared signature – but it hardly mattered. They were strafing almost at random, yet with the sheer level of firepower they were putting out, they were bound to hit someone eventually. They were keeping the assault force pinned inside the base and trapped, buying time for reinforcements to arrive.
A MANPAD team took a risk and fired a missile right into their teeth. This time, the results were rather more spectacular. One of the fighters exploded with terrific force and shoved the other fighter into a spin that came within millimetres of crashing into the ground. The larger craft apparently decided to call it a day and vanished, although Edward suspected that it hadn’t gone very far. The alien reinforcements would be on their way.
“The Ravens are coming through now,” his radio said. “Cover them.”
“Understood,” Edward said. The Ravens were running out of the base, carrying with them an astonishing amount of alien gear. The Ravens had the same training as the remainder of the American Special Forces – as well as specialist USAF training – and he hoped that they knew what they were bringing. It would be the height of irony to discover, later, that they’d carted away junk or alien toilets. “Recommend we move fast. This area is becoming hazardous.”
“So is the base,” the CO said. “We’re on our way.”
***
“You have to leave us here,” the Wrecking Crewman said. Nicolas glared at him, unwilling to comply. It was a code as strict as anything else from the military. No one – but no one – was to be left behind. He would have risked the entire team to bring back dead bodies if necessary. “We’ll be out of here before the bomb goes off.”
“I’m not leaving you behind,” Nicolas said, sharply. “Set the bomb and then we can all get out of here.”
“The bomb needs to be guarded until we can trigger the anti-tampering system,” the Wrecking Crewman said. “If we set the bomb now, one of the aliens could disable or destroy it before it goes off. The anti-tampering system will trigger the bomb the moment someone actually touches it. We have to stay and guard it until the rest of the team is out of the base. Go!”
Nicolas stared at him, seriously considering dragging them along, before snapping a salute. “Come on,” he ordered, and urged the remainder of the assault force back up the stairs and out of the alien chamber of horrors. Behind them, the Wrecking Crew would be selecting their positions and waiting for the signal that would warn them to set the bomb and make their own escape. They should be able to hold out long enough, yet the odds of them making it to safety were low. He wanted to run back and drag them out, but they were right. Cold logic ordained that their lives were placed at risk. “Move!”
They double-timed it up the stairs and back into the chamber of suspended people. “No luck, sir,” the tech said. The handful of soldiers guarding him shook their heads in agreement. “Whatever these tubes are made of, I can’t break it without killing the person inside. I’ve tried to drill through only to lose good drill bits and small amounts of explosive are just as useless. They’re trapped until we can figure out a way to break them free.”
Nicolas swept his gaze from column to column. Humans – perhaps kidnapped from Earth, perhaps cloned by the aliens. Humans – like him and the rest of the team. Humans – who he’d condemned to certain death. The United States military existed to prevent civilians from being killed by enemy action, not to condemn them to death. Nicolas served the finest military force in the world, a force that never took part in political repression or gunned down protesters in the streets…and yet, the cold equations demanded that he sacrifice the alien captives, the mystery of their presence still unsolved. Perhaps, if the base survived, they could negotiate with the aliens to retrieve the captives…
He shook his head. “Leave them,” he said, finally. He keyed his radio to the general channel. “Saigon. I say again, the heat is on in Saigon.”
It would make no sense to the aliens, he hoped, but it was one of a set of codewords they’d arranged back at Fort Benning. It warned that the nuke was being prepared for detonation and that it was time for all of the team to fall back to the hangar deck and prepare to leave the alien base. He took one last look at the columns and then pushed them out of his mind, saying a silent prayer for the souls of the innocent men and women who were about to die at his hands. He hadn’t brought them to the base, he hadn’t organised their use as experimental subjects – he was sure that was what the aliens had had in mind – but they would die at his hands. He pushed the thought out of his mind as he concentrated on returning to the hangar deck. The teams had strung rope ladders down to allow them to escape.
“We really could do with taking one of the craft,” a remaining Raven said. “Sir, four of us could carry it and…”
“If you think you’re Will Smith and you can fly it out of here, do it,” Nicolas snapped. Carrying an entire alien craft back to the transports would be difficult, even if the aliens hadn’t thought to include a transponder on their craft. They would certainly have learned that lesson after losing one of their craft, either to an engine fault or a base’s defence systems. “We can’t carry it out of here and that’s final.”
Green flashes burst out in the distance as a group of enemy warriors mounted a counterattack. They seemed to have realised that the humans were retreating and were trying to drive them out of the base, or wipe them out before they could get home. The real question was how badly they’d been hurt and if they’d try to get to the Wrecking Crew and disarm the nuke before it could be detonated. The remaining soldiers returned fire, but there was no point in making a stand.
“Hit them with two more Javelins,” he snapped at Rawlings. “We’ll get out of here in the confusion.”
“Yes, sir,” Rawlings said. The Javelin teams had been held back for emergencies. Two antitank weapons flashed past the team and into the enemy position, detonating in a massive explosion. Nicolas felt the heat even at their distance and realised that they had to have hit something explosive. “Sir?”
Nicolas took one last look into the alien base. They’d fought through it, but they still didn’t know how big it really was or what it had really been for, apart fro
m sadistic medical experiments. The aliens might have been using it to study Earth a long time before they marked the planet down for conquest, or perhaps they had another reason behind all the sadism. He doubted that they were an entire race of sadistic monsters. That would have been beyond reason. There had to be a point for all the horror. He just wished he knew what it was.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “Move out!”
***
Jeremy Damiani braced himself as the four Wrecking Crewmen gathered around the nuclear weapon. It was really nothing more than a metal box, wrapped in a rucksack that would have passed unnoticed in any American city, a thought that never ceased to give him chills. It had been the Russians who had pioneered the backpack nuke, but it hadn’t been long before the Americans had built one that was “bigger” and “better.” If the bomb had detonated somewhere in New York, the entire city would have been trashed. Jeremy wasn't blind to the level of trust the President had placed in him – the Wrecking Crew reported directly to the President through the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – yet he knew something he hadn’t told Commander Little. The Wrecking Crew would have to remain with the weapon until it was detonated.
A nuke wasn't a weapon that could be triggered by another weapon, not like high explosives or Fuel Air Explosives. The enemy could simply destroy the nuke with their plasma weapons, or do something beyond human imagination to reduce the weapon to useless dust; they couldn’t take the risk of leaving the weapon unprotected. Jeremy had accepted the risk of a suicide mission ever since he had been recruited – his files had been wiped to the point that no one even knew that he had existed as anything other than a Wrecking Crewman – yet now he was faced with the possibility, part of him quailed. It wasn't for himself – he had no family and few friends – but for the other three. They’d shared so much together, yet they’d have to share their deaths as well. What other choice did they have?
He pushed the weapon into a corner and opened the access hatch in the top. The specialists back at the base had removed the standard system – intended to prevent a terrorist from triggering the weapon, even if they somehow stole it from the most secure complex in the United States – and replaced it with a system that could be triggered very quickly, by anyone. Commander Little would probably have been rather upset to know that someone could have wiped out the entire force by accident, yet there was no other choice. The weapon might have to be triggered too quickly for a standard protocol. He pressed his fingers against the fingerprint reader, passed through the authorisation procedure, and typed in the arming code. The weapon was armed and ready to fire.
They exchanged a look of shared understanding as they listened to the brief exchanges between the other commandos, retreating from the alien base. By Jeremy’s estimates, it shouldn’t take them longer than twenty minutes to get out of range, although he knew that it was an estimate based on other estimates. The base might absorb most of the blast and channel it up and down to destroy everything the aliens had built, or the blast might melt through the rock and come raging after the assault team. Nukes could be unpredictable at times, particularly when almost nothing was known about their target.
“They’re coming,” one of the team members said, using sign language. Speaking aloud or using the radio might betray their presence. Jeremy hoped that the aliens wouldn’t search the base as soon as they drove out the remaining members of the assault team, but in their place, that would be the first thing he'd do. Any Special Forces soldier had plenty of training in leaving IEDs behind to confuse and irritate any pursuers and they would all have to be disarmed, carefully. “Stay down.”
Jeremy grasped his rifle, leaving one hand on the bomb’s detonation switch, as the lights suddenly came up to full intensity. The sheer horror of the room had been hidden from them by the semi-darkness, but now he saw it clearly. The aliens who’d done this – who could do this – deserved to die, even at the cost of all of their lives. Was that, he wondered as his hand tightened on the trigger, what the aliens had in mind for all of humanity? Had they been studying the human race to determine the most effective means to gain control?
The first group of aliens were from the little caste, followed by two taller aliens. They seemed to miss the Wrecking Crew at first, and then they saw the soldiers and started gibbering away in an alien language. Jeremy wasn't unused to such reactions – they’d happened in various countries as well – and he levelled his weapon at the aliens and started firing. The alien bodies blew apart very satisfactorily, but a group of warriors came charging into the room and returned fire, blazing away at the Wrecking Crew. They didn’t seem to be inclined to press the issue, but they had to know that there was no way out. They could sit back, keep the pressure on and wait for the team to starve.
“Now,” Jeremy said. The longer they delayed, the greater the chance that something would happen they couldn’t predict or handle. He pushed down on the trigger. “It’s been an honour…”
The world went white.
***
Nicolas and the rest of the survivors hadn’t bothered with trying to be stealthy. They’d just run as fast as they could from the alien base, praying that the alien fighters high overhead wouldn’t consider them reasonable targets and start attacking them from the air. They hadn’t bothered to engage troops on the ground in America, but they might have a different opinion of the humans who had invaded their base. They’d moved as quickly as they could, but the earthquake when the nuke detonated sent them all to their knees. The ground had shaken violently.
He turned to look back towards the base and saw a glowing mushroom cloud forming in the air. It reminded him of a volcano erupting as secondary explosions shook the ground, sending towering flames high into the sky. The Wrecking Crew had clearly been lost in the explosion – it might have been what they’d had in mind all along – but they'd hurt the enemy. They'd definitely hurt the enemy. The alien base had been completely destroyed.
The alien craft overhead seemed to agree. One moment they were hanging in the air, flying bearers of bad news, the next they were gone, leaving the humans alone. Nicolas was too tired to be relieved, but there was no time to sleep. They had to get back to the transports, and then to the subs, and then back to the United States. The raid’s objectives wouldn’t be completed until they’d gotten themselves back home. He had a nasty feeling that they’d have problems leaving the continent. The aliens would have to know where the attackers had come from, and they could easily take out a defenceless base. If the station were gone, they’d have to make contact with the submarines on their own to get home. It wouldn’t be easy.
He smiled inwardly as the team started to walk again. If the job had been easy, they wouldn’t have needed the combined force to take the base out. No matter how powerful the aliens were, that had to have hurt. He just hoped that it had hurt them enough.
Chapter Forty-One
Washington DC, USA
Day 41
“They took them all out?”
“Yes, Mr President,” Wachter said. “They took out every research station and tourist site in Antarctica. Just after the nuke went off, they swooped around the continent and blasted all of the stations from the air. There might have been a few survivors, but without any shelter or help they’ll freeze to death within a few days.”
The President rubbed his eyes. Part of him knew that the loss of so many lives was a tragedy. Part of him wondered if there was a way to use the deaths of so many foreign nationals to encourage the rest of the world to resist the aliens as well. Even if they chose to fight, it wouldn’t help the United States. Their fighters would be bounced and destroyed by the aliens when they tried to cross the Atlantic to come to America’s aid.
“And then they took out the George Washington,” Wachter added. “The last signal we picked up from the carrier reported that the ship had taken heavy damage and the Captain had given the order to abandon ship. Since then, nothing. We’ve spoken to several governments in the
area and convinced them to launch SAR missions, but the odds of rescuing more than a handful of crew are very low. I think they’re probably going to start taking out the remaining carriers as well.”
“Probably,” the President agreed, bitterly. He wasn’t used to being so helpless. An American carrier was normally an untouchable weapon the United States could bring to bear against anyone who offended it. Now they were just…targets, targets that could be overwhelmed and sunk by alien fighters. Their fighter wings needed to be redeployed to ground bases in order to keep flying against the aliens. The bases on the ground could soak up much more damage and keep going. “Anything on the diplomatic front?”
“The news is still sinking in,” the Secretary of State admitted. “Most of our allies have their own problems at the moment, even without direct alien attacks. They’ve got millions of people who are suddenly unemployed and rioting in their streets. The British and French have been sending their armies into their cities in hopes of stemming the tide of rioting before it does more damage. The bottom line is that I doubt we’ll get more help than we already have – all of which is covert and very deniable.”
“Which might not matter to the aliens anyway,” Wachter said. “Mr President, I feel that we should look at a few important details.”
Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem Page 38
