Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “We’re clear,” Pepper said. “All we need to do now is meet up with the Resistance and get out of here.”

  “Oh,” the President said. He felt better than he had in months. “Is that all, then?”

  ***

  From a distance, the looming shape of the alien craft covered the horizon, somehow visible as an area where no stars shone. Jones watched, barely aware of the ship’s engines coming to life and the freighter sailing away from the Potomac, joining hundreds of other boats fleeing the country, trying to find an elusive safety. This ship was headed for Britain, along with many others, mainly the rich trying to find a new home in a hurry. They had no intention of being caught up in the middle of an occupation, or an insurgency. He considered them nothing better than traitors – they’d never sent their children to war, or understood the real world – yet he too was fleeing, even if it was under orders. Perhaps MacArthur had felt the same when President Roosevelt had ordered him to abandon the Philippines. MacArthur had been leaving his men behind in serious danger…and many of them would die in Japanese POW camps.

  The President’s orders had been beyond dispute. “You will take the two crashed ships to Britain for them to study,” he had said. The original crashed ship was still at Area 52, but others had been recovered during the war. Now that America had been crushed, the study might not be continued, even if the aliens didn’t hit Area 52 and recover their missing craft. “Once there, you will assist them to the best of your ability and report to the Ambassador. There will be work for you there.”

  Jones caught sight of a sailboat that looked tiny, too tiny to make the trip across the Atlantic, and felt a moment’s pity for the sailor. He'd have to fight Mother Nature as well as the aliens, if they came out to sink the refugee human fleet. An ironclad guarding the waters would be very helpful now, but if there were any American naval vessels left in the area, they weren't advertising themselves. The submarines had been ordered to escape to Britain and make contact with the British, as well as American forces stationed overseas. The reports that the aliens had been landing in North Africa and the Middle East had suggested that American forces in Iraq might be in trouble…but there were so many reports and no way to know which were accurate and which ones were not.

  Bright lights shone overhead when he looked up at the stars. The night sky had been enhanced by hundreds of new lights, alien craft in orbit around Earth. There looked to be hundreds, if not thousands, of them; the ship’s Captain had told him that all of the world’s satellites had been taken out. Jones hoped that the stealthed satellites had survived untouched, yet there was no way to know for sure. Outer space belonged to the aliens.

  He watched an alien craft flying overhead, scaring the people below, but making no hostile moves. The hundreds of ships couldn’t have been of much interest to them – hell, perhaps the refugees were making their lives easier by fleeing. They’d missed the crashed ships in the freighter…

  “Enjoy it while you can, you bastards,” he muttered, staring towards the alien craft. “We’ll be back.”

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Area 52, Nevada, USA

  Day 75

  There was no longer any television, apart from a handful of local channels. Alex had never believed that he would miss television, or the sheer volume of shit pumped out by Hollywood producers and newsreaders, yet it would have been a link to something outside the base. The aliens had shut the television channels down, however, even without intending to do so. Their place had been taken by talk radio and the Internet, yet neither of them were reliable. The Internet had been badly damaged by the alien attacks, but somehow it had kept going. It had been originally designed to resist a nuclear strike and the aliens hadn’t inflicted quite that much damage.

  The reliable spotters and observers for the Resistance – as well as a few of the more reputable bloggers – had been providing useful data, yet most of it was depressing. How could it not be? Every military base had been attacked and occupied by the aliens, forcing the defenders to stand and fight or vanish into the shadows to carry on an insurgency against the invaders. Fort Hood’s terrain was making it a nightmarish battleground for both sides, yet the aliens had time on their side. Every major city had been ringed by alien ground forces, all aircraft were grounded, and all of the regular military forces had been scattered. The Resistance was working desperately to pull them all into the underground, but it was taking time, time the aliens were using to solidify their grip on the country. The reports from Washington and several other cities suggested that the aliens had started to feed and water the population, giving them a vested interest in seeing that the aliens remained undisturbed. Other reports had large alien landings in areas with small human populations, and humans being evicted from their homes without warning. The alien colonists were landing and taking over their new home.

  He wished, desperately, that Jane was here, but she was at Area 53, trying to talk to their alien captive. Jones was also gone, ordered to leave the country by the President for knowing too much, leaving Alex in charge of the Tiger Team. He had never expected command in his life – the FTD Directorship was about the most he could hope for – and now he was the senior officer in the base. Colonel Fields still ran the day-to-day operations, but he'd made it clear that Jones had had supreme authority and as his successor, Alex shared that authority as well. Alex privately suspected that Fields simply didn’t want to do anything that might draw alien attention to the base – so far, they hadn’t attempted to occupy it – and Alex couldn’t blame him. The problem was that they needed to hit back hard…

  And they had no weapon capable of scratching the massive alien craft over Washington. A nuke might have done it, except that the command and control links had been destroyed in the last hours of the war. With the President hidden away somewhere in Virginia, there was no way to order the submarines to strike – and, if they had, the ballistic missiles would have been shot down by the aliens a long time before they reached their target. The Resistance had a handful of tactical nukes, and others had been hidden around the country, but how could they get them to the alien craft? He’d wondered about slipping one into Washington and detonating it, but the others had nixed that idea, pointing out that there was no guarantee that the nuke would take out the alien craft. Frustrated, he walked into the hangar to see Neil Frandsen. The advanced propulsion specialist might have some idea how to scratch the alien ship’s paint.

  He looked up at the alien craft as he entered the hangar. It still never failed to take his breath away, even if it had been half-dissembled by the researchers trying to understand how it worked. Parts of the ship’s computer core had been moved to one of the lower levels where a team of researchers were trying to hack into it, although all they’d recovered so far had been gibberish. Alex had pointed out that they might be reading alien signals sent in the clear and they wouldn’t know about it – after all, the aliens would hardly speak English amongst themselves. The hackers had agreed, but pointed out in turn that certain basic principles of computer language would be recognisable and they would be able to use that to unlock the rest of the database. Alex hoped that they knew what they were talking about, but he knew that it had taken over five years to create the F-22 computer system and the alien craft were considerably more complicated. Some of the alien tech seemed to be barely two or three years ahead of humanity. Some of it was so advanced that Alex doubted they’d figure it out in less than a decade.

  It might not matter anyway, he reminded himself. The alien FTL drive, whatever its limitations, wouldn’t give them any tactical advantage in the long term. They'd be better off figuring out how the alien weapons and sublight drives worked, which would even the odds between the human air forces and the alien fighters. The plasma weapon alone would be useful, unless the alien craft could absorb power from plasma shots as well. It would explain why the aliens never seemed to worry about the prospect of friendly fire. Superheating plasma seemed to be possible provided there
was enough power on hand to generate a magnetic field,but no one had managed to do it in a research lab, let alone in the field. Besides, accuracy seemed to be almost a matter of luck rather than skill.

  “Hey, boss,” Frandsen said. “I finally found something cool!”

  Frandsen been quick to discover that Alex hated being reminded that he was the boss and took ruthless advantage of it. The only one who understood was Santini, who’d had to send men and women to their deaths before. He’d been talking about leaving Area 52 to join the Resistance and Alex had had to promise him that when they finally developed something that could be used to hit back at the aliens, he’d be in the lead.

  “Wonderful,” Alex said, dryly. Frandsen might have been overjoyed at each new discovery from the craft, but Alex found it hard to think about such wonders when the aliens were sucking the life out of his entire country. The longer the aliens had to establish themselves, the harder it would be to drive them into the sea, or space, or anywhere that wasn't America. “What do you have to show me?”

  “This,” Frandsen said. He pointed to a bizarre combination of devices that had been worked together on the table. “What do you think of her?”

  “It looks as if a toaster has been unfaithful with a radar set,” Alex said, dryly. Toaster jokes had been floating around Area 52 ever since the craft had been moved in and studied. Some wise-ass had even posted a picture of an Asian movie star on the toaster in one of the common rooms. “What is it?”

  “This, my friend, is the prototype of a weapon for bringing down one of the really big alien craft,” Frandsen said. “What do you think of her now?”

  Alex’s eyes narrowed. “What is it?”

  Frandsen dropped into lecture mode. “The alien craft generate drive fields that absorb energy being shot at them up to a certain level,” he said. Alex, who knew this already, nodded impatiently. “This explains why bullets were completely ineffective against the alien craft and missiles worked perfectly, sometimes too well. They exploded against the drive field, overloaded it, and either caused a second explosion or forced the craft to fall out of the sky. Unlike our craft, they don’t have much in the way of aerodynamics, but I imagine that they wouldn’t need them in space.”

  “Maybe,” Alex said. The aliens had claimed not to know about humanity until their craft had drawn close to Earth, but they had still come loaded for bear. It suggested either that they were as fundamentally warlike as humanity, or perhaps that they’d been lying all along and that they’d always had invasion in mind. There was just no way to know for sure, unless Jane managed to get their captive to talk. “How does this apply to one of the really large craft?”

  Frandsen grinned. “I haven’t been able to duplicate their drive fields yet, but I have been able to produce computer models of how they must behave,” he explained. “The bigger ships have to lift much more mass and – obviously – have greater tolerance for additional energy than the smaller craft. The massed missile attack just before the Fall of Washington was simply insufficient to bring the craft down, which might have been a blessing in disguise. If the craft had exploded, Washington would certainly have been badly damaged and every aircraft in the sky would have been swatted out of it.”

  “They got swatted out of it anyway,” Alex reminded him, tightly. He’d lost friends in the war, men and women who’d given it their all and lost their lives. He knew better than to blame them, no matter what some morons were saying on the internet; there had hardly been a secret government plan to sell America to the aliens. “Can you get to the point?”

  “It’s impossible to be sure, but a nuke might not be enough to overload the drive field and bring the craft down,” Frandsen said, tightly. “The drive field would be able to spread the energy over the entire hull. The results might not be pleasant for the aliens, but I doubt it would bring the craft down. This, on the other hand, might just be enough to give the aliens a serious jolt.”

  He tapped the device fondly. “A year or so ago, DARPA produced a design for a plasma warhead, something that would produce an awesome amount of energy over a relatively small area. The idea was to hunt down terrorist caves in godforsaken parts of the world…and probably melt Russian and Chinese ships as well. A standard cruise missile wouldn’t suffice to take out a major carrier with a single shot, but a plasma warhead would certainly render the carrier useless even if it didn’t sink it. The design was tested a few months ago and it worked, once they worked all the bugs out. Half the time, the warhead simply refused to detonate.”

  “How reassuring,” Alex muttered. “And are you sure that this one will detonate?”

  “Like I said, they worked all the bugs out,” Frandsen assured him. “I had them ship one over here for comparison to the alien system, but that was useless…never mind. The point is that with a little finagling, we can hit the alien craft with one of these warheads, properly configured to create a local overload in the alien system. The results should be…interesting.”

  “We’re talking Independence Day here,” Santini said. Alex jumped. He hadn’t heard the soldier coming into the room. “Your device might bring the alien craft crashing down on Washington.”

  “Might being the operative word,” Frandsen agreed. “Alex, I don’t know exactly what it will do to the alien craft. They might manage to compensate – my computer models say that is unlikely, but they can’t account for everything – or the craft might simply shrug off what does happen and carry on anyway. All I can say for sure is that they’ll know that they’ve been kissed.”

  “Very well,” Alex said, ruefully certain that he’d face a mutiny if he disagreed. “How do you intend to get it to Washington and then to the alien ship?”

  Santini grinned. “I’ll take the device and four of the soldiers in one of the trucks,” he said. “We’ve got links to the truckers anyway, so we’ll pass for truckers until we reach Virginia. The aliens aren’t interfering much with traffic outside the major cities yet – more reason to move now while we still can – and we’ll make contact with the Resistance – and the Army of Northern Virginia. They’ve got a deserted airbase that hasn’t been touched by the aliens, and one of the aircraft there will carry the warhead to the alien ship.”

  “Suicide,” Alex said, flatly. “Who’s going to fly the mission?”

  “The ANV flies Predators – in this case, a modified stealth Predator Remotely Piloted Vehicle, an RPV” Santini explained. “They intended to arm several of them with nukes and fly them right into the path of incoming alien vessels, but the war situation overran them before they managed to get them all prepared and launched into the air. We know that the aliens ignored a handful of RPV craft during the air battles, apart from two that engaged the alien craft with missiles and got shot down. Our RPV won’t be shooting at them, but will be flying up to the alien craft and detonating the warhead as it impacts with the drive field.”

  “They’d have to be mad to let it get so close,” Alex objected. “They certainly had no trouble tracking the Raptors…”

  “Which were shooting at them, and operating in broad daylight besides,” Santini said. “The RPV I intend to use is stealthy enough to give even the aliens pause…”

  “Their detection systems aren’t much better than our own,” Frandsen added. “The stealth coatings should work as long as they don’t do something stupid like emitting a signal or opening fire. We can operate the RPV through the stealthed satellites and laser communications – the aliens won't be able to detect that unless they accidentally fly through the laser beam and pick it up. Alex, we can make it happen.”

  “We don’t know how long we have either,” Santini added. “The aliens are running right down a damned checklist. They took Langley and Fort Meade pretty quickly. What’s to stop them overrunning the airfield and destroying the Predators? We can’t stand up to them in open combat…”

  “One point, then,” Alex said. “Consult with the President first. This is well above our pay grades.”


  “Yes, sir,” Santini said. “I’ll see to it at once.”

  ***

  The American military communications system had been built to withstand terrorist attacks, nuclear strikes and massive EMP pulses that could have blacked out the entire continent. An alien attack was nothing compared to an EMP, or even a massive nuclear strike, and elements of the command network remained intact. Hundreds of nodes – those representing military bases and a number of vital installations – had gone offline, marking the areas the aliens now controlled. Complex verification protocols had been implemented to make it harder for the aliens – or anyone else, for that matter – to hack into the system and gain control, but Alex had his doubts about how useful they actually were. The more complex a system, in his experience, the easier it was for some unhelpful soul to gain entry and cause some real damage.

  There was no way of knowing where the President actually was, a security measure Alex thoroughly approved of. Given enough time, the aliens would probably find a way to hack into the network and try to download data from it, either by themselves or with human quislings assisting them. Alex and the rest of the Resistance had studied – frantically – tactics used by resistance and counter-resistance operatives in other countries, but few Americans had ever seriously considered fighting an underground war in their own country. The few that had tended to be militia groups that believed that the government had sold out to ZOG – a Zionist group that somehow ruled the world – or the UN. Alex had a private suspicion that most of them would wet their pants the moment they came face-to-face with an alien warrior.

  “It’s the President,” Dolly confirmed. She was part of the base’s security staff, a small woman with a very sharp mind. “Voice print analysis confirmed. Stress analysis indicates a mild level of stress, consistent with his current situation. He’s not under duress.”