Outside Context Problem: Book 01 - Outside Context Problem

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Thank God,” Alex said. They’d only heard the basic story of the President’s escape from Washington, but the Internet had spun it up into a story involving stealth helicopters and a daring midnight flight in Air Force One, leaving hundreds of dead aliens in the President’s wake. “Mr President, we have something of a possible option here.”

  He ran through the entire proposal in basic terms, passing over the specifics. “If it works, we risk bringing the craft down onto Washington and destroying the city,” he concluded. “We need authorisation to hit the craft that hard.”

  The response was immediate. “Granted,” the President said. Alex was surprised, and not a little horrified. The decision had been made so quickly! “I’ll issue the supporting orders from here; the Resistance can secure the airbase and prep the Predator for flight.”

  “Ah…yes, Mr President,” Alex said. “I’ll…”

  “Good luck,” the President said. His voice hardened. “I’ll contact you when it’s time to discuss further measures.”

  The connection broke.

  Santini dismissed Dolly with a wave. “Surprised?”

  “Yes,” Alex admitted. It was hard to speak. “Why…?”

  “Because the President knows that there are no rules any longer,” Santini said. “The old Rules of Engagement went out the window when the aliens landed and occupied our cities. Everything we used to justify binding our hands, to keep them clean of blood by not killing people who deserved death no longer matters. This is our country under occupation.”

  “And Washington?” Alex asked. “Everyone in the city?”

  “Expendable,” Santini said, flatly. “All that matters now is hurting the aliens as much as possible. We have to get rid of them quickly, whatever it takes, or our descendents will spend the rest of their lives in slavery. Washington is expendable against the rest of the country and anyone who stayed there when the aliens were breathing down their necks deserves everything they get.”

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Washington DC, USA (Occupied)

  Day 82

  The small airfield seemed completely deserted, but Nicolas and his team checked around the surrounding area before they finally cut their way through the fence – carefully avoiding triggering the alarms – and made their way inside. From the outside, there was little more to the airfield than a pair of buildings – one hangar, one control shack – but inside, they discovered a high-tech operations centre. Nicolas had to smile inwardly as they checked out the various rooms in the building, taking nothing for granted. Someone might have thought that the airfield represented a way out of America, or at least away from Occupied Washington, and hidden in the buildings when they discovered they couldn’t fly the RPV. The team found no one, much to Nicolas’s relief. They might have had to shoot them to maintain security.

  He glanced into the hangar and stared at the RPV. He’d seen Global Hawks and Predators on deployment while he'd been in Afghanistan, but the stealthed Predator was a very different design. It reminded him of seeing an F-117 for the first time, yet it was smaller and somehow lighter than any of the manned stealth fighters. It was completely black, as if it absorbed all the light in the room, without even a flag or any other American markings. It was the ultimate deniable asset – or it would have been, if any other country in the world had the ability to produce such a craft. Perhaps, he reflected, now that aliens were present on Earth, maybe they’d get the blame in future. The F-117 had been mistaken for an alien craft before…

  The USAF had hated the very idea of RPVs and for a long time, any pilot who seriously considered going into RPVs found it career suicide. The USAF had been so fixated on the next generation of manned fighters – which had eventually led to the Raptor and the JSF – that it had largely ignored RPVs until it had become impossible to resist their introduction. The CIA, on the other hand, had loved the concept and had expended a great deal of its own funding in building a private air force of Predators, often arming them and sending them against targets of opportunity. They’d come hellishly close to disaster more than once – Nicolas had heard, in Afghanistan, how a Predator had come far too close to ramming a British Harrier – yet they’d persisted. The RPV program had provided SpecOps teams like his own with support they needed desperately, even though they did have their limits. Enemy forces had managed to hack into the Predator control links on more than one occasion.

  His earpiece buzzed. “Truck coming,” one of his men said. “The cargo?”

  “Take positions,” Nicolas ordered, quickly. In theory, the tiny microburst transmissions were undetectable except at very close range. In practice…he intended to keep their use down to a bare minimum. The aliens might be able to track the team down by their radio signals. “Stand by…”

  The truck turned off the road and came to a halt near the hole in the fence. Nicolas braced himself, just in case a swarming alien army came out of the truck, before a man climbed down with his hands conspicuously empty. Nicolas peered through the night scope and relaxed slightly as he recognised Santini from the briefing before they’d gone to hit the alien base. The three other men with him didn’t look familiar at all, although they were clearly soldiers, even out of uniform. They’d probably been regulars rather than Special Forces, he decided. They didn’t have the same attitude and ability to blend in with the mundane world surrounding him.

  “Cover me,” he subvocalised, and stood up, walking right towards the truck. Santini turned to face him, holding up his hands. Nicolas raised his voice. “Code?”

  “Fat Lady Singing,” Santini replied. Nicolas relaxed slightly. “Rather obvious if you ask me, but no one did.”

  “Me neither,” Nicolas agreed. Someone at the Presidential bunker – wherever that was – had obviously watched too much Independence Day. “Do you have the device?”

  “Yep, and a guy to install it,” Santini confirmed. “Can you open the gate? We’ll have to get the truck right up to the hangar.”

  Nicolas watched as Santini backed up the truck and his ground crewman started to work. One advantage of the whole RPV program – or so he’d been told – was that a person who had spent most of their lives playing video games could pick up flying the Predator easily. He'd been assured that some Predator pilots had believed that they had been playing video games up until the moment the Predator had returned to base, although he didn’t believe a word of it. CIA was over-funded and under-worked, even after President Chalk had started to reform the intelligence sector, yet even they would have balked at risking a Predator on such a folly. What if the pilot smashed it into the ground, unaware that it was more than just a game? Nicolas himself had been taught how to fly one from the ground – he’d had to operate a smaller Dragon Eye drone back in Afghanistan – yet he wasn't a master pilot. He hoped that the ground crewman knew how to fly the RPV. It wouldn’t be the first time someone had to scrub a mission because of a minor oversight like that.

  “We’re ready,” the crewman said, finally. “She’s all armed up and ready to fly.”

  “Good work, Joe,” Santini said. They walked into the small control room. Someone with a sense of humour had rigged it out to look like a cockpit from a plane, complete with stick and video monitors in place of a canopy. He wasn't sure if it was meant to encourage the pilots to remember they were flying a real plane or merely for the amusement of their superiors – either explanation fitted the CIA – but as long as they worked, he didn’t care. “Are you sure you can fly this thing?”

  “If I can’t, we’re all dead,” Joe replied, tightly. Nicolas liked his attitude. “Get the hangar doors open. I’ll do the rest.”

  The briefing had said that the Predator wouldn’t be guided by standard radio transmissions, but by a laser link to one of the stealthed satellites floating around the Earth. The aliens, so far, had either missed them or chosen to ignore them – Nicolas hoped that it was the former. It didn’t seem likely that, after they’d blasted the remaining satellites – regardles
s of who they belonged to – out of orbit that they would have ignored the stealthed communications satellites. That might change after his group mounted their attack. He wasn't sure if it was worth the price.

  He shook his head, angrily. The country had been invaded – no, the country had been occupied. The Resistance was already fighting, yet most of the population had been badly shocked by how quickly they’d been defeated and they needed hope. They needed a sign that the aliens weren’t invincible after all. The mission, if it succeeded, might convince them that there was still a chance for victory. Otherwise, the Resistance might die out quickly and the alien conquest would be complete.

  “No emissions, apart from the laser beam,” Joe said. “There’ll be nothing to guide them to the Predator. They won’t get any warning at all. Their craft, at least, is putting out enough energy that a blind man flying an Avenger could track it easily.”

  Nicolas heard the faint sound of the RPV powering up and advancing towards the runway. The CIA hadn’t stinted on the sound-dampening system. A regular jet would have produced a deafening noise, yet all he could hear was a dull hum. In the air, the briefing had assured him, the Predator was completely silent, a legacy of the time when a sound-detection system had brought down an F-117 in 1999. The aliens shouldn’t even know that it was in their airspace.

  “Here goes nothing,” Joe said, and pushed the stick forward. Nicolas saw the dark shape racing down the runway and vanishing into the gloom. “We’re off…”

  Nicolas found his lips shaping a silent prayer. The Predator wasn't moving at supersonic speed and it would take time for it to reach its destination, time in which anything could go wrong. They’d considered trying to warn the people still within Washington and the surrounding area, but that might have got back to the aliens. Nicolas had spent time in places where the local population might have preferred the Americans, but didn’t trust their ability to protect them, and knew that the occupying power had probably already found some friends in Washington. Hell, for all he knew, the thousands of government bureaucrats had already sworn allegiance to their new master.

  And, if the mission succeeded, a lot of people were going to die.

  He didn’t consider himself a monster, despite the vitriol frequently aimed at the SEALs and other Special Operations Teams by their detractors, yet now they might have a point. Thousands of Americans were at risk because of him. They’d die under the craft or perhaps be killed when the aliens retaliated for the strike. Who knew the rights and wrongs of it? Their deaths might serve a greater purpose – the salvation of the entire planet – or they might just be petty acts of violence carried out by terrorists. Whoever wrote the history books would determine how the future looked upon him and his men. He shook his head in frustration. He’d sworn an oath to protect and defend the United States and as for the rest…

  God would judge him.

  ***

  The majority of the population of Washington – those who had remained, cursing themselves for not having fled with the remainder of the population – had moved, almost as a group, to the edge of the city, away from the looming alien craft. The aliens hadn’t objected, even though they’d been registering and monitoring the humans in-between feeding them and putting them to work. Abigail had never felt so sore in her life. The alien leader – she was already thinking of him as the Commandant – had put her to work clearing rubble from the streets, along with thousands of others whom the aliens had deemed otherwise useless. Doctors and other medical professionals had been allowed to carry on their work, soldiers and policemen had been rounded up and taken away somewhere – no one knew where – and utility workers had been pushed into getting the power and water supplies back on. Resistance was useless. The aliens simply shot anyone who dared to resist. A group of gang members had been cut down right in front of her, screaming about their rights to the last. The aliens hadn’t cared.

  There were, she knew, a handful of humans who hadn’t registered, yet the aliens didn’t seem to care all that much. They wouldn’t have to care. They handed out food to those who worked for them and insisted that it be eaten onsite, apart from men and women who wanted to take it home to their families. The hidden ones would have to eat their own food or eventually sign up with the alien program, or starve. She hoped that they were soldiers, watching, waiting and plotting the liberation of Washington, but there was no way to know for sure. She kept her distance from them. Every day, dozens of new human bodies were discovered and taken away by the aliens. No one knew who was killing them, or why. The aliens didn’t seem to care.

  She clutched the ID card around her neck as she stumbled into the apartment she’d claimed. It had once belonged to a rich young lobbyist, she’d deduced from a brief check of his belongings, who’d worked for one of the more exclusive lobbying firms. He and his wife had gone missing somewhere during the invasion and she’d felt only a brief twinge of guilt when she’d moved in. She tried to keep it in good condition, in hopes that the real owners would one day return, but she knew better. They'd never come back to reclaim what was theirs.

  “Damn it,” she muttered, looking over at the laptop she’d salvaged from one of the other apartments. It had taken several hours to dissemble the security precautions someone had built into the unit’s hard drive, yet all she’d found had been spanking porn, much to her private amusement. She’d managed to hook it into the Internet – now that the power was back on, so was the Internet – but WNN seemed to have completely vanished. Some of the more reliable bloggers were still going strong, but the sheer volume of rumours and lies on the net dwarfed the truth. She’d checked a vast registry of missing people that someone had compiled and her name hadn’t been on it. It made her wonder if anyone cared, or if the aliens had wiped all of WNN out of existence. She might be the only WNN employee left in a world gone insane.

  There hadn’t been any shortage of men willing to ‘protect’ her in exchange for sexual favours – however expressed – but she’d declined all such offers. It helped that the aliens kept a tight leash on their human slaves; rapists, thieves and murderers got the death penalty, often at once. The handful that had tried to continue, keeping themselves well away from the aliens, had been driven away by the other humans, just to protect the rest of the group. Civilisation was breaking down and all that was left was to protect themselves. The aliens just…watched. They just didn’t seem to care.

  She’d studied them while she laboured for them and had reached her own conclusions. There was only one alien race, but it came in many forms. The Warriors fought and guarded the human prisoners. The Workers seemed to do all of the menial work, although they’d been pressing humans into service to assist them with that. The Leaders issued orders and seemed always to be obeyed. The Leaders were also the only ones who spoke English. The Workers just ignored any questions put to them and the Warriors motioned for the humans to go away and stop pestering them. They all wore the same uniforms and it was impossible to tell them apart, yet she was sure that there were layers to the alien society she wasn't seeing. They couldn’t just be ants in an anthill, could they?

  This isn’t a informal setting, she reminded herself. They’re not at their best.

  She would have liked to see an alien city, to see how they interacted without humans around, but that seemed impossible. Her horizons had shrunk to Washington DC – or what was left of it. There seemed to be no way out. The most optimistic postings on the net only confirmed it. She was trapped.

  ***

  “Getting closer,” Joe muttered. The live feed from the Predator was showing up clearly now. A massive dark object hung in the air, visible only because it was darker than the surrounding night sky. Nicolas couldn’t pick out any of the details, apart from a vague sense of its shape. It could have been anything from a giant flying saucer to a hovering aircraft carrier, yet it was alone in the night sky. The hundreds of fighter craft that had escorted it to Washington were not in evidence. They could be anywhere – either o
n the mothership in orbit or overseas fighting it out with other human powers – but Nicolas didn’t care. As long as they weren't watching for threats to their massive ship…

  “This is pretty much our last chance to back off and forget this,” Joe said. “Are you sure you want to proceed…?”

  “Get on with it,” Santini snapped. “Now!”

  Joe nodded. Nicolas saw tears glistening on his cheeks. “Yes, sir,” he said. “Impact in ten…nine…eight…”

  Nicolas swung over to the window and ripped away the curtain, staring towards Washington and the massive dark shape over the city. He was just in time to see a brilliant flare of white light in the darkness, casting the entire city into stark relief. The protectors on his goggles darkened automatically, saving him from going blind, although he knew that others wouldn’t have been so lucky. The entire ship was glowing…

  ***

  The light burned through the curtains, shocking Abigail as she showered, trying to wash the grime off her body. The noise hit a second later, shaking the entire building, convincing her that someone had nuked Washington. Naked as the day she was born, she staggered towards her armchair and scooped up a dressing gown, pulling it on as she ran to the stairs and down to the streets. If someone had nuked the city, she had to get out, whatever the risk. The warm air struck her as she ran onto the streets and she looked up. The massive alien craft was blazing with light.

  Shielding her eyes with one hand, she peered up towards it, just in time to see explosions rippling through the craft. Chunks of material, each one the size of a small house, were falling towards Washington, bombarding the stricken city. The craft was somehow trying to manoeuvre away from the city, trying to get out over the ocean, but it was too late. In terrifying slow motion, disintegrating as it moved, it fell towards the ground and crashed. The force of the impact took her to her knees, but she couldn’t look away. A pearly-white flash of light, followed by a massive fireball, rose over the city. The entire alien craft had been knocked out of the sky.