Under Foot

(Outside Context Problem: Book II)

Series Listing

Book One: Outside Context Problem
Book Two: Under Foot
Book Three: The Slightest Hope of Victory (Coming Soon!)

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When the smoke cleared, the little steamer had reached the misty horizon, and Carrie was safe. But the Thunderchild had vanished forever, taking with her man's last hope of victory. The leaden sky was lit by green flashes, cylinder following cylinder, and no one and nothing was left now to fight them. The earth belonged to the Martians. 
-Jeff Wayne's The War of the Worlds
Under Foot Cover Blurb

Earth has fallen...the United States and the Middle East have been occupied by alien forces, while the rest of the world is collapsing into chaos.  And yet humanity is still fighting; the underground resistance fights a bitter insurgency against the aliens, with the population forced to choose between resistance and collaboration.  The fight seems hopeless, yet humanity dares not lose.   If the aliens win, resistance will not only be futile, but inconceivable.

Earth has fallen, but the battle is far from over.
Dear Reader

Under Foot is book two in a series that starts with Outside Context Problem, which is also available on Amazon Kindle.  You can download a free sample of that book – and many others – from my site; if you this book, please consider rewarding me by posting a review on Amazon.  

Book Three should be released, all being well, in February or March next year.  Watch my blog or facebook page for updates.

As I am not the best editor in the world, please let me know about any spelling mistakes and suchlike.  Drop me an email and I will reward you with a cameo in my later books.

Chris
Prologue

Yellowstone National Park, USA
Day 83

The small cabin was well hidden within the National Park, in a location marked as off-limits to both visitors and Park Rangers.  The handful of Park Rangers who knew about the existence of the cabin believed that it was nothing more than the property of a slightly eccentric billionaire, who had paid out over a million dollars for an exclusive home.  The truth was a little more sinister.

Stanley McIntyre stood on his front porch and stared up into the darkness.  So far from civilisation, there were no lights to impede the stars from shining down – along with the hundreds of alien craft in orbit.  He’d peered up at them through his telescope and noted their size and rough dimensions, many of them far larger than anything humanity had ever put in space.  The internet – the parts of it that were working – claimed that the aliens were landing in sparsely-populated areas and settling their colonists down where they could establish their cities.  After the United States military had been beaten so comprehensively, resistance was limited, apart from a single successful strike at the heart of alien power.  A massive spacecraft, larger than even an aircraft carrier, had been brought down over Washington.  The aliens had hundreds of other craft, but losing such a major vessel had to hurt.  He hoped it hurt.

There was no one else nearby, apart from thousands of campers who had decided to hide out at Yellowstone.  He couldn’t blame them for that, but they risked compromising his security – under the circumstances, KEEP OUT signs were likely to be ignored.  They warned of landsides and other dangers, yet desperate men and women trying to hide from the aliens would be likely to run right into danger – or the land mines Stanley had placed around the perimeter.  The closest possible help was miles away and if the cabin was attacked, he’d have no choice, but to hold out as long as possible.  His superiors had believed that one man living alone would be less noticeable than a group of men – or even a mixed group – and he’d conceded the point.  In hindsight, it had been a mistake.  The Wrecking Crew were unusual in that they had female agents and one of them could easily have posed as his wife, or daughter.  They’d done it before.

Carefully, as if his life depended upon it, he folded up the telescope and packed it away for another day.  Anyone looking at it wouldn’t have found it anything out of the ordinary – thousands of telescopes had been purchased after the alien mothership had been detected, before the human race had found out that the aliens were far from friendly – but caution had kept him alive before and would keep him alive for many years in the future.  He checked around the cabin – experience had taught him that remote sensors were never as effective as the designers claimed – before stepping back inside and closing the door behind him.  The interior designers had done a fairly good job.  If he ever had to entertain, as unlikely as that was, he could easily pass for an eccentric rich man, even under the cold gaze of the IRS.  The real surprises lay buried under the cabin.  

He glanced into one of the inner rooms and checked that everything was in place, even though no one, but he could have touched them.  A stockpile of weapons, high explosives and other tools of the trade awaited his inspection, enough weapons to attract entirely the wrong kind of attention if anyone stumbled across them.  The State Government would require a great deal of soothing and his superiors in the White House would be most displeased…not that either mattered any longer.  The White House was a pile of rubble in burning Washington and the State Government was trying to cling on, knowing that it was only a matter of time before the aliens told them to collaborate – or else.  His possession of the unregistered weapons was nice and legal now, although the aliens wouldn’t care.  They’d probably suspect that he intended to wage his own private war against them.  The irony was that they would be wrong.

Out of habit, he pulled the Geiger counter off its hook as he headed down to the basement.  The security measures were extreme, yet he was chillingly aware of just how pitiful they would have been against a determined assault.  The counter clicked reassuringly in his hand as he inspected the inner door, without stepping through.  The nukes were still in place and, if God were kind, he’d never have to touch them before someone arrived to take his place.  Even with the Federal Government largely destroyed, the Wrecking Crew survived, serving the President as they had done for the last thirty years.

Yellowstone National Park sat on a huge volcano.  The last time it had erupted, modern humans hadn’t been around, although its effects were easy to see.  The briefing had warned that a major eruption was expected to take place at any time, with disastrous results for America.  The Federal Government – he had been amused to discover – had ignored the possibility, although it was hard to see what they could have done about it.  If the eruption had been powerful enough, it could have exterminated the human race – indeed, he’d seen several bad movies and books concerning that very possibility.  If terrorists had smuggled a nuke into Yellowstone and detonated it in the right place, it might have been the end of the United States…

It might still be the end of the world.

The orders had been clear.  If humanity failed to win independence, or even equality, with the aliens, the nukes were to be emplaced in the right location and detonated.  If the simulations were right – if, the briefing officer had explained, barely able to believe his own words – the resulting explosion would trigger the volcanic eruption to end all volcanic eruptions.  If the aliens truly had nowhere else to go – another if – two races would die along with Earth, unless the aliens possessed some technology that could save their people from being choked by the ash, or frozen by the sudden cold.  If, if, if…

He took one final look at the sealed door and climbed back up into the comforting light of the cabin.  He’d volunteered for the mission against his better judgement and there were times when he wondered if Cabin Fever would get the better of him, or if his mind would fade and he’d go down into the basement and trigger the bombs without orders.  The fate of the entire planet rested in his hands.  If the Resistance failed to liberate the country, if the orders came from the President, if the aliens stumbled across the nuclear stockpile…

Earth would burn and they would all die together.
Chapter One

Chicago, USA (Occupied)
Day 95

“They’re coming!”

Master Sergeant Edward Stalker braced himself as the alien vehicles approached.  Once upon a time, the Marines would have had orbital observation satellites and optical sensors to help them locate their targets, but now…now there was only the Mark I Eyeball.  The Marines – and the survivors of America’s military – had stockpiled weapons and equipment all over the country, yet his superiors had decided that Chicago’s gang-based resistance movement didn’t need access to such technology.  It wasn't a decision Ed could reasonably disagree with, but now he would have been grateful for anything he could get.  They were about to strike their first blow against the enemy and they desperately needed to succeed.

Chicago had been his hometown, years ago.  He’d pulled himself out of the ghetto to join the Marines and aim for a better life, but his superiors had decided that his talents would be better spent in assisting the gangs to become more practiced insurgents.  It wasn't the standard work of Force Recon – it was something better left, he considered, to the more shadowy organisations – yet there was little choice.  The resistance had to get organised before the aliens clamped down hard enough to make resistance impossible, even if humans wanted to fight back.  The food and drink the aliens were handing out at their food stations might have been tasteless, yet for many in the area, it was the most they’d ever had.  The gang leaders didn’t like it – their footsoldiers would be tempted away to join the alien collaborator forces – and they’d been plotting trouble for days.  Ed had been quite happy to help them make life worse for the aliens.

They’d sealed off most of the city simply by landing outside it and forming a cordon around it – and having their little fighter craft sink any boat that attempted to flee over the water – and they’d occupied the administrative section of the city, but they hadn’t attempted to put boots on the ground everywhere.  Ed hoped that meant that they had only limited resources, but he had a private suspicion that the aliens rated part of Chicago as useless and surplus to requirements.  He couldn’t really blame them for that decision, but it was one he intended to make them regret.  There were thousands of Special Forces soldiers scattered through the cities, preparing to make the aliens hurt, and with the gangs they had all the manpower they needed.

He didn’t trust the gang lords entirely though; that would be stupid.  He’d visited some of the lords, demonstrated his abilities, and convinced them to send a handful of their best men to train with him.  The AK-47s and other weapons – liberated from an arsenal that had been prepared for Middle Eastern soldiers – he’d brought had been carefully distributed, encouraging the gang members to be more loyal to him than their leaders.  It wouldn’t last – many of them were already suffering from withdrawal as their supplies of drugs were cut off by the alien blockade – yet it would last long enough to keep them angry at the aliens.  Many of them would have made good soldiers if they had had the courage to apply and leave the area forever, but that was the curse of the ghetto.  No matter how you struggled, escaping was a bitch and few succeeded.  And, even then, you carried the scars for the rest of your life.

“Get ready,” he muttered.  “Wait until I give the word.”

He would have preferred a team of Marines by his side, but as far as he knew, he was the only Marine in the city.  There were probably other soldiers working with the gangs as well, or laying surprises for the aliens, something that would have been kept from him.  He had no illusions about the kind of treatment he could expect if the aliens caught him, not after what he’d seen in Antarctica.  If the aliens had been willing and able to abduct thousands of innocent humans and dissect them for an unknown purpose, they wouldn’t hesitate to torture a captured soldier, if they needed to torture at all.  For all he knew, they might have a mind-probe that could reach into his head and extract memories at will.  Security was the watchword at all times.  

It was ironic, but the life of the poor in America was better than the lives of the rich in some of the hellholes he’d seen in his life.  The gang members might have been the products of broken homes, poor education – if they’d had any education at all – and the harsh school of the streets, yet they made better warriors than some trained soldiers he’d seen in the Middle East.  At least they listened to him when he issued instructions, although it might have had something to do with the fact he was more than willing to kick ass if it was required.  Teaching Arabs or Afghanis had never been so easy.  And besides…

He’d sometimes speculated about returning to the ghetto with some of his fellow Marines and kicking the gangs out, reforming it by force.  It might have made sense – the only reason the gangs were allowed to remain in the city was official indifference and political considerations – yet it wouldn’t have been easy.  The gangs were composed of people who had no stake in American society, no interest in maintaining it and no real concern for their own lives, let alone anyone else’s life.  The tactics he’d been teaching them would work even better against the American Government than they would against the aliens, assuming that they lasted long enough to see the government restored.  The President was in hiding, no one had heard from the Vice President in weeks and the Mayor…was collaborating.  The aliens hadn’t hesitated to take advantage of his decision to start putting the city back in order, their way.

There were seven alien vehicles, he saw.  Two of them were the armoured cars they’d used in attacks on military bases across America; the others were heavy transports carrying supplies to their base at the heart of the city.  At least they weren't pressing human vehicles into service as transports, he decided, even though human trucks were often more capable than the alien vehicles.  It might have been a security precaution or perhaps they’d simply decided that they could rely on their own people now, but it hardly mattered.  All that mattered was that there were no humans caught in the crossfire.

The resistance had carefully placed a small collection of oil barrels by the road three days ago and waited.  Dozens of alien convoys had zoomed past without their escorting Warriors paying any attention to the barrels, much to his private amusement.  They wouldn’t have lasted long in Iraq or Afghanistan, although the internet warned that they showed a remarkable capability for learning from experience.  If they were a warrior caste, as seemed clear from their biology and the role they played in the alien society, perhaps they had the weaknesses of such a caste as well as the strengths.  It would be very human of them.

A day ago, the resistance had returned to the barrels and replaced the contents with high explosive.  If the aliens had checked out the barrels, they would have discovered nothing, but sand…until now.  Now…

He reached for the detonator and smiled.  “Goodbye,” he muttered, and pressed down hard on the trigger.  The resulting explosion shook the building concealing him and part of the attack group, but it would be even worse for the aliens.  The explosion would have devastated their convoy.  He sprang to his feet, ignoring the plaster drifting down from the ceiling, and peered out of the window.  The alien convoy looked as if it had been hit by the Hand of God.  Four of the vehicles were burning wrecks, two were flipped over and badly damaged…and the seventh vehicle was nowhere to be seen.  Alien Warriors were swarming out of the burning vehicles, swatting away at each other to put out the fires and trying to recover.  Ed had no intention of giving them any time to recover.

“Hit them,” he snapped, and squeezed the trigger.  A withering hail of fire poured down on the aliens from both sides of the road.  The aliens reacted at lightning speed and dived for cover, but there was little cover to be found amid the ruined convoy.  Ed silently counted off the seconds in his head as he targeted another alien and put a bullet through his head.  It wouldn’t be long before the aliens responded in force to the imprudent humans who’d attacked their convoy.

His radio buzzed once.  The aliens maintained a CAP over the city using their oddly-shaped fighters, the same craft that had shot their way through the USAF and established air superiority before the ground invasion and the Fall of Washington. The spotter had been primed to warn him when one or more of the alien craft broke away from the patrol pattern and headed inwards, towards the ambush site.  There was no more time to delay.  The alien craft moved at staggering speeds and could cross the entire country within minutes.

“Out, out now!”

The gang members didn’t hesitate.  He’d warned them in lucid detail of what might happen when the aliens responded to the new threat.  They couldn’t hope to stand up to the aliens in a straight-up battle, so they’d fade away and strike again another day.  They ran down the stairs, two of them dropping their weapons as they fled.  He made a mental note to drop both of them from the team after they slipped away from the aliens and returned to their base.  They couldn’t risk losing weapons, or giving the aliens priceless clues they could use to hunt down the resistance.  The Mayor’s collaboration meant that some of the police would be helping the aliens – after all, they needed to eat as well.  He didn’t want to think of the police as quislings – actually, coming from his background, it was easy to think of them as merely serving the powerful – but it had to be faced.  The war against the aliens would be a civil war as much as anything else.

A flash of blue-white light left him blinking as an alien warrior team opened fire, shooting down two of the gang members.  Ed fired back madly and had the satisfaction of seeing one of their heads explode before running away from the building.  The alien warriors seemed to be capable of taking an astonishing amount of damage without slowing down, but he’d never heard of one surviving a headshot before.  If he’d been designing a warrior race, he would have built in a high degree of pain tolerance and multiple backup organs as well, although he perhaps wouldn’t have made them so ugly.  The aliens would have had difficulty getting laid in a whorehouse with an unlimited credit card from the most famous bank in the world.

“Ed, what…?”

“Keep moving,” Ed snapped, as one of the gang members slowed.  There was no time now.  A shadow high overhead announced the presence of one of the alien fighters; a moment later, a shockwave knocked him to the ground as bright flashes of light shattered the surrounding buildings.  The alien ROE seemed considerably less limited than the Marines had had in Iraq, he noted absently.  They were willing to tear apart the entire area to get at the insurgents who’d dared to attack them.  He hoped that their sensors weren't much better than human systems.  Discovering that the aliens could track them effortlessly would really ruin their day.  “Don’t stop for anything!”

Larger alien craft were orbiting overhead now, including a pair of transports.  They were about the same size as C-5 Galaxy Transport aircraft and served a similar purpose, transporting troops and weapons into a deployment zone.  Hundreds of alien warriors were swarming out of their holds now, jumping down to secure the area.  If they reacted quickly enough, they might cut off the gang members before they could escape and capture – or kill – them.  That couldn’t be allowed, even at the risk of his own life.

The bag was right where he’d left it, waiting by the entrance to the underground.  He’d feared that someone would steal it – with the economic crash and the alien blockade, people were desperate – although once they opened the bag, they’d probably faint.  The Stinger missile set had been configured to punch through the drive field of an alien craft, yet it had no other use, unless as an improvised antitank missile.  There was no point in using it for that.

“Get everyone down into the basement and out of here,” he said, as the gang members ran past him.  He’d started the day with thirty half-trained men.  It looked as if he’d lost at least ten of them in the brief encounter.  The alien craft were drifting over the area now, watching for signs of trouble.  Bright flashes of light announced that they’d found a target and were pounding it from high above.  The bastards might not even be shooting at insurgents, but civilians trying to hide from them.  “Keep moving!”

“Yes, sir,” Vassar said.  He was one of the more intelligent gang members and would have made a fine soldier, had he escaped the ghetto.  He would probably end his days as a gang lord, if he didn’t get thrown into prison or killed first.  The latter was looking more likely every day.  “Good luck.”

I work for a living, Ed thought, as he hoisted the Stinger onto his shoulder and took aim at the nearest alien craft.  The problem with using any kind of missile against the alien ships was that the missile had to pack enough punch to disrupt their drive fields and either destroy them or send them crashing to Earth.  It wasn't something human designers had had to worry about before the aliens arrived and so they hadn’t produced handheld SAM missiles with enough punch.  One of the independent nations might produce a new design soon enough, but they might never reach America.  Don’t call me sir, damn it.

The seeker unit growled as it locked on to the target and he squeezed the trigger.  The missile leapt from the tube and raced right towards its target.  The alien craft had no time to react.  It took them mere seconds to adjust their drive fields to move faster, yet no one could have reacted in time to escape.  The missile struck the alien fighter amidships and sent it crashing down towards the ground.  A moment later it crashed and a massive fireball rose up in the distance.  It was hard to tell from his position, but it looked as if the alien craft had come down on their heads.  It would definitely ruin their day.

He scooped up the bag and ran into the building, down the stairs and into the basement.  A few days of hard work had opened a link between the basement and the vast network of sewers and underground tunnels below Chicago, allowing the gang members to come and go at will.  It had astonished even him to learn just how many tunnels there were under the city, an odd mixture of used and disused sewers, old civil defence bunkers, underground transport links and a thousand other oddities.  With care, they could avoid being caught for months, perhaps years.  He doubted that even the aliens would be willing to flush the tunnels with troops to dig them out, although gas remained a more pressing concern.  They had gas masks from the old civil defence stockpiles, but no MOPP suits.  He took a moment to throw a switch and prime the bomb, before diving down into the tunnels.  The darkness no longer threw him.  It was an old friend.  

“Sir?”

“I told you to run,” Ed snapped.  Vassar remaining behind was a surprise, even though he supposed he should have expected it.  “What would happen if we were both caught?”

“One of the others would take over,” Vassar said, unperturbed.  Ed suspected that the only reason Vassar called him ‘sir’ was to annoy him.  “You’re more important than any one of us.”

Ed shrugged.  “Never mind that for now,” he said.  A dull rumble in the distance suggested that the aliens were gathering to avenge the deaths of their fallen brethren.  He was rather surprised it had taken them that long.  “We need to get out of here.”

They ran down the slippery tunnel, heading towards one of the disused sections.  It had once been a home for the homeless, somewhere where liberal eyes never visited or understood.  The homeless hadn’t wanted charity, or pity, merely a place to lay their head and rest.  Behind them, the ground shook.  Ed had rigged up the building with enough explosive to bring it crashing down, burying their entrance under a pile of rubble.  The aliens might dig down to locate the entrance, or they might give it up as a loss.  There was no way to know how they’d react.  The lights flickered once as the disruption shook the network, but didn’t fail.  It was almost a relief.

“We hit them,” Vassar said, delighted.  Ed recognised the post-battle rush from his own early days in the Marines.  It was the joy of knowing that you were still alive, having tested yourself in the oldest game of all.  “We hurt the bastards!”

Ed said nothing.  The truth was that no one expected the gangs to do more than hurt the aliens from time to time.  The blockade would make it difficult to smuggle in more weapons and ammunition from outside, while the aliens would tighten their grip on the city and encourage more collaborators to enter their service.  There was a good chance that they would lose the war, yet their deaths would buy time for the rest of the resistance…

He smiled, grimly.  Who knew?  Perhaps the horse would learn to sing after all.
Chapter Two

Washington DC, USA (Occupied)
Day 95

“Karen,” a voice said, as she entered the room.  “How nice to see you again!”

Karen Lawton blinked in surprise.  She hadn’t expected to discover that the aliens knew who she was – indeed, after the war had begun, she’d tried hard to keep anyone from discovering her real identity.  She’d detected the first signals from the alien mothership as it approached the Earth and some people had blamed her for the war, torching her house back home in California.  Her dreams of fame and fortune – dulled by a growing awareness that the aliens were not all they seemed – had died then.  They’d blamed her for the alien contact, yet she hadn’t even been the first human to discover the existence of alien life.

Three months ago, an alien craft had crash-landed outside a USAF base, revealing the existence of aliens to the government.  They hadn’t told the people anything until after the aliens made open contact, yet by then it had been too late.  The aliens had woven a tissue of lies around a kernel of truth and successfully split America from her allies, before launching a devastating invasion that had culminated in the Fall of Washington and the occupation of the entire country.  Karen had witnessed the events from Washington, where she’d been staying along with her parents under Secret Service protection.  The morons who’d blamed her for the invasion had had no idea that she was right under their noses and, after Washington had been occupied, she’d kept her head down until one of the alien collaborators had given her a note ordering her to attend a meeting in one of the buildings they’d taken over.

“Ah…Director,” she stammered.  Daisy Fairchild had been the Director of SETI when the alien signal had been detected, yet Karen had lost contact with her in the chaos following the alien invasion.  Somehow, she wasn’t surprised to discover that she’d landed on her feet.  Daisy hadn’t been a dreamer, but a ruthlessly practical Director with a politician’s eye for opportunity.  She’d turned the alien contact into a glittering opportunity for SETI, even though it had turned nasty after the aliens invaded.  “I didn’t know that you were here!

“I’d have called for you earlier if I’d known that you were here, but our friends don’t have a complete register of everyone caught in the lockdown,” Daisy said, waving Karen to a sofa.  “Would you like a drink?  I have coffee, or perhaps something a little stronger…?”

“Coffee would be fine, thank you,” Karen said, feeling her senses reel.  Coffee had become a rarity in Washington after the invasion – the aliens simply weren't letting anything through the blockade surrounding the city.  The remaining cans were being hoarded by people who had no intention of giving them up for free.  Karen had heard rumours that people were paying for goods and services with coffee rather than anything else, even sex.  “How did you get it into the city?”

“It’s easy if you know the right people,” Daisy assured her.  Her voice became rather snide.  “One must embrace change and accept the new reality.”

“I see,” Karen said, although she didn’t.  It was starting to sound as if Daisy was collaborating openly with the aliens.  It would be just like her to attach herself to the most powerful force in the area and bend it to her will.  “Why did you want me here?”

“The truth is that the war is lost,” Daisy said, simply.  “Those of us who work with the People…”

“The People?”

“The aliens call themselves The People,” Daisy explained.  “I don’t know if it’s merely a translation or something else, but…who are we to argue?  They took America and they’ll take the entire world.  They can call themselves whatever they like.”

With an understanding that we’re not People, Karen thought, coldly.  Semantics had never been her thing, but she did understand from debating clubs that allowing your opponents to define the terms used for the debate ensured that you would lose.  If Daisy was collaborating, the aliens would have a window into the human world they wouldn’t otherwise have, or perhaps they would.  Daisy was right.  The aliens looked strong and strength always attracted people who wanted to survive, or gain power for themselves, or exploit the aliens for their own purposes.  Hell, there were still people who believed that the aliens had come to save the human race from itself.

“I’ve been working with them over the last week to assist them in their project,” Daisy continued.  “I need an assistant and I was delighted when their system spat out your name.  You’ve worked with me before and I’m sure that you could work with me again.”

That, Karen knew, was pushing it.  She’d been a simple radio specialist at SETI and she’d rarely laid eyes on the Director, apart from annual events and parties.  They’d been pushed together after the aliens had made contact, but Daisy had been trying to exploit her fame and the alien contact for SETI – and her own benefit.  Karen had never trained as an assistant, never even thought about becoming an assistant…and then it occurred to her that it didn’t matter.  The aliens would hardly need a three-year training course and a useless degree to hire her.  They were already hiring thousands of collaborators and promising them better treatment, in exchange for loyal service.

“And there will be benefits for you as well,” Daisy continued.  “You could rise high within their service, or have your own private access to food supplies and equipment without having to stand in line and wait for someone to feed you.  You could…”

Karen listened with half an ear.  She wanted to throw her offer back in Daisy’s face and tell her to get fucked, yet she didn’t quite dare.  The aliens had taken people away before and probably wouldn’t hesitate to take Karen away as well, if Daisy told them that she was a threat to their security.  They’d rounded up soldiers and policemen and sent them somewhere – no one knew where, even though there were horrifying rumours – and she didn’t want to join them.  For all she knew, the aliens were using them for their sadistic experiments.  She didn’t want to end her days being dissected by an alien scientist.

And it was an opportunity.  If she was right at the heart of the collaborator machine, she could do a great deal of damage…

“I understand,” she said, finally.  “I’ll be glad to join you.”

Daisy beamed.  “Excellent,” she said.  “You won’t regret it for a second.”

The next couple of hours passed in a blur.  The collaborators had taken over a number of buildings and installed all the luxuries of home.  Karen was given a suite to herself, with a massive bath and a chance to wash, before a pair of servants came in and gave her a complete makeover.  She had never been particularly vain as a child, but the chance to dress up again – and wash the grime out of her body – was invigorating.  It tempted her, even as she realised that it was a trap.  The two weeks she’d spent in Washington under occupation, deprived of essential luxuries, had convinced her that anyone who wanted a simpler life was an idiot.  The aliens could tempt people just by turning the power on and granting them coffee and better food.  The joy of wearing clean clothes again was almost orgasmic.

“You’ll be attending the party later in the day,” one of the servants said.  Karen had no idea that such people still existed in America.  She’d never been so pampered in her life.  It was easy to believe that someone treated like that for every day of their life would grow up into a spoiled brat.  “What about this dress here?  It would go well with your hair.”

“And show off everything I had to every eye in the room,” Karen said, still wondering about the party.  Who would hold a party when half the city was starving?  “Can you find something more demure?”

“Maybe this one,” the servant said, holding up a green dress.  “It’s rather less revealing.  It’ll just need a little bit of alteration and it will be suitable.”

“I suppose,” Karen said.  A thought occurred to her and she leaned forward.  “What’s your name?”

“Jasmine, Miss,” the girl said.  “That’s Jessica over there.  The one in the bathroom cleaning up the mess is Jennifer.”

Karen stared at her.  She was tall and devastatingly pretty, with brown curly hair and a brilliant smile.  She couldn’t be much older than eighteen – Jessica looked barely older than sixteen, with red hair in pigtails – yet what was she doing as a maid?

“We used to work for one of the very wealthy families,” Jasmine explained, when Karen asked.  “We had to take care of all of their needs – and I mean all of them.  It beat being out on the streets and trying to take care of ourselves, but when the Orcs landed they donated us to them as servants for their pet humans.  You’re being nicer than most of them.  There’s a spoiled brat two doors down who seems to think that she owns the world.  Her daddy used to be a senator or something.”

There were a hundred questions Karen wanted to ask, but she didn’t know how to formulate the questions…and she wasn't really sure that she wanted the answers.  It was a window into a whole other world, one where wealth equalled power and ensured that the lucky few could have whatever they wanted, without regard for the law or human decency.  None of the servants appeared to be illegal immigrants, or other powerless humans, but ordinary girls from the streets of Washington.  The hell of it was that they had a better life than many of their fellow citizens.

“You’ll understand at the party,” Jasmine said, as soon as she had finished working on Karen’s hair.  She hadn’t stopped even while talking.  “Wait until you see the people who have been gathered together to turn the country into an alien paradise.”

She closed her mouth as Daisy stepped into the room, without knocking.  “It’s time to go,” she announced, as Karen came to her feet.  She glanced briefly at the three maids.  “You are dismissed.”

Jasmine bowed, a bow that exposed most of her cleavage, and they retreated from the suite, closing the door behind them.  “They’re one of the luxuries for those who cooperate,” Daisy said, dryly.  “It’s best to just ignore them and concentrate on keeping your eye on the ball.”

“Of course,” Karen said, slowly.  The maids probably heard and saw everything.  Befriending them would definitely serve her well.  “Did you arrange a handsome prince to escort me to the ball?”

Daisy started, and then giggled nervously.  “I’m afraid not,” she admitted.  “There are plenty of handsome…well, attractive…well…men who will be at the party, but you won’t have time to take one home.  After you’ve been presented to the People, we’ll get something to eat, perhaps a dance or two, and then we’ll be going straight to work.”

Karen frowned.  “If that’s true,” she said, “why are we going to the party at all?”

“Because Ethos has insisted that we all be there and we cannot defy him,” Daisy explained.  “Come along, my dear.  There’s too much to be done.”

Karen followed her down the long corridor, looking from side to side as they passed rare paintings and statues.  The hotel had once catered to the very wealthy alone and it would have cost her a year’s salary to even spend a day in the building, unless she worked as a maid.  Now, it catered to collaborators and welcomed anyone who served the aliens, or even the aliens themselves.  She found herself wondering what use, if any, the aliens made of the maids.  The thought was so absurd that she almost giggled.

The scent of food – good food – touched her nostrils as soon as she stepped through the door.  She was looking down a long flight of steps into a ballroom decorated in a style that screamed wealth, fame, and a complete lack of taste.  Gold and silver decorations were scattered everywhere.  The crowd below seemed primarily composed of fat men with poorly-fitting suits and women clinging onto their arms.  A handful of women were on their own, clearly powers in their own right, but most of the women seemed to be little better than prostitutes, or desperate.  A swimming pool, of all things, occupied one corner, filled with young men and women wearing tiny costumes, when they wore costumes at all.  Karen found herself blushing and had to look away.  She’d had her own sexual adventures when she’d matured, but nothing like the…orgy that was going on down below.  It stunned her…

And yet there was something odd about it.  There was a faint air of desperation in the air, a sense that the crowd knew that something was wrong, that the wolf was at the door…and that if they concentrated enough on the good things, the wolf would fade away through sheer ignorance.  Karen followed Daisy as she led her down the steps and into the ballroom, where she was given a glass of bubbly by a maid wearing the briefest of outfits, trying to keep her face under control.  The tables groaned under the sheer weight of food, food that was desperately needed by the people outside.  Had Paris looked like this, she wondered, on the eve of the French Revolution?

“You must meet some of these people,” Daisy said, and led her from person to person.  They all blurred together in Karen’s mind, a progression of businessmen, politicians and even a handful of foreign ambassadors.  The latter seemed to take a certain amount of pleasure in watching the downfall, sharing smirks from time to time at America’s disgrace.  The businessmen were more concerned with getting their people back to work and rebuilding the country.  The politicians seemed concerned about their own power and position.  None of them impressed her as much as President Chalk had impressed her, back when the world had made sense.  “They’re all going to shape the new America.”

Karen kept her thoughts to herself as Daisy finally led her over to the buffet table.  Her mouth was salivating in anticipation as a maid passed her a plate and invited her to help herself.  There were little pieces of French bread, with sliced ham, beef, chicken and turkey, with salad and sauces.  There were steaming pots of stew and curry, surrounded by smaller bowls of rice and other dishes.  It was a feast unlike anything she’d seen before the invasion, yet…it was odd.  Several of the guests were clearly making return trips to the food, but it never seemed to run out.  A maid brought in a plate of tiny cakes and the guests gathered around her, taking as many as they could carry in their hands.

“Tell me something,” she said, slowly.  “Where does all of this come from?”

“The food comes from warehouses and suchlike,” Daisy said, vaguely.  “The People and their assistants requisitioned it for their own use and stored it until it was needed.  In the long term, the farms will be pushed into producing much more food to keep the country going and feed our new population.”

Karen saw the implications at once.  “They can eat our food?”

“Yes,” Daisy said.  “They seem to have something of a problem with alcohol, but they can eat pretty much anything else.  In fact…”

She broke off.  “Look,” she added.  “That’s one of the aliens in person.”

Karen followed her gaze.  A single alien, inhumanly tall and thin, was making his – or her – way through the room.  He was coming right towards her and, as he moved, the crowd seemed to shift around him as if they couldn’t stand to be too close to the alien.  The horde of sycophants and collaborators seemed to be trying to talk to the alien, yet the alien was ignoring them, or so it seemed.  The massive dark lidless eyes looked deep into hers and she felt dizzy.  She had never been so close to an alien before.

“Welcome to our service,” the alien said.  He had a faintly unpleasant voice, as if he was talking through water.  “Your service will be richly rewarded.”

“Thank you,” Karen stammered.  Her legs were unsteady and she would have collapsed if Daisy hadn’t put a hand on her arm.  The alien had looked at her and left her feeling naked and vulnerable.  “I live to serve.”

The alien seemed to take it at face value.  “You have served us well already,” he informed her.  “Your service in the future will be appreciated.”  One inhuman hand made a motion towards the plate of food she carried.  “Eat, drink, enjoy our bounty.  Tomorrow, the real work begins.”

He departed, leaving Karen staring after it.  “Why…?”

“Ethos wanted to meet you in person,” Daisy said.  “That alien is the leader of their entire race.”

Karen stared at her, disbelieving.  “Really?”

“Apparently,” Daisy said.  “They don’t seem to think the same way we think.”

A bell rang before she could say anything else.  “Ladies and Gentlemen,” a voice said.  An alien stood on a podium at the head of the room.  It seemed to be a different caste from Ethos, which meant…what?  “I present to you the new leader of this country, President Jacob Thornton!”

Karen felt her mouth drop open and she closed it with a snap.  Jacob Thornton had been the Vice President under Chalk, a man she’d never met.  She couldn’t believe that Chalk had chosen a collaborator to serve under him, yet the evidence seemed unmistakable until he started to speak.  His voice was flat and tired, as if he couldn’t even muster the energy to lie.  He spoke as if he were speaking against his will.

My God, Karen thought.  All around her, the collaborators were cheering their new leader.  If they realised what had happened to him, they showed no sign of caring.  What have they done to him?
Chapter Three

Mannington, Virginia, USA
Day 97

The bunker dated from the Cold War era.  It was cramped, with barely enough room to swing a cat, decorated in a style that was oppressive at best and unpleasant at worst.  The handful of modern computers and communications equipment that had been recently installed in the bunker only added to the sense of general depression and isolation.  It was easy to believe, in the bunker, that the universe had shrunk down to the tiny complex and the real world only existed as a figment of imagination.  

President Andrew Chalk found it maddening.  After the flight from Washington – and the successful destruction of one of the massive alien command ships over Washington – the small party had eventually reached Mannington, a small town in Virginia.  Mannington was, like many other small rural towns, intensely patriotic and conservative, populated by residents who muttered suspiciously when the government’s name was invoked.  The President had grown up in a nearby town – he was the town’s most favourite son, according to the billboards – and in some ways coming to Mannington was like coming home.  He’d never spent time in a bunker as a child, of course, and just knowing that his home town was nearby was somehow worse than being isolated.  He could have walked home in a few hours, except that that would have risked exposure and captivity.  The aliens would be keeping an eye on his home town, expecting him to show up.

Assuming, of course, that they care, he thought, studying the latest intelligence reports from Washington.  The alien lockdown continued despite the crashed ship and the devastation strewn in its wake, leaving the handful of observers in the city dangerously exposed if they were captured.  The aliens had handed out ID Cards as they registered the humans within the lockdown, organising them into work forces and deploying them at will.  The reports suggested that more and more humans were turning to collaboration as a relief from serving the aliens in other ways.  The President hated the thought of any American – any human – serving an alien power, yet he had to admit that it was more than likely.  The UFO nuts had been telling people for years that, one day, powerful aliens would arrive to set the world to rights.  They probably felt vindicated when the aliens crushed the military-industry complex and occupied Washington, believing that the aliens came in peace.  The President couldn’t allow himself such delusions.  In his nightmares, he remembered the first visit to the alien mothership and the alien leader’s quiet statement.

“We want your planet…”

The bunker itself was supposed to be completely off the books, although the President knew better than to take that for granted.  It had been originally built during the Kennedy years as an emergency fallback position for some elements of the government and placed in the care of a very patriotic and loyal family.  The only record of its existence lay with the Secret Service, who had kept it on a contingency plan that no one had ever expected to have to use.  The bunker had internet access and enough stored food to last a handful of people a year, yet it wasn't a command bunker and it wasn't secure.  Mannington was a small town.  Even if everyone took arms, the aliens could still blow their way through the defences and capture him, if they knew that he was there.  He had to assume that he was still Number One on their capture list.  They’d want him to give a veneer of respectability to their conquest.

He looked down at the reports and winced.  The aliens continued to land in America – and North Africa – and were expanding the area they directly controlled.  Most of the major cities and population centres were in some kind of lockdown, with alien forces surrounding them and preventing people from leaving, often with lethal force.  There were reports of thousands of skirmishes on the internet, with the aliens sometimes taking losses – sometimes even losing fights and allowing people to escape – but always sealing the gap and regaining control.  Some of the reports were unbelievable, some were depressing and some…were just absurd.  He doubted that the aliens were genuinely interested in kidnapping thousands of human women and transporting them to the mothership, not when they were working desperately to get as many aliens as they could off the mothership.  Their willingness to get as many of their people down to Earth as possible, even at risk of human attack, suggested that they’d been telling the truth and their life support really had been pushed to the limit.  They seemed to be willing to tolerate population densities that no human society would tolerate for long, yet they were still expanding the areas they were controlling directly and pushing humans out.  It wouldn’t be long before they had vast swathes of Flyover Country permanently under their control.

The map told a chilling story.  The aliens had established massive bases in Utah, Wyoming and North and South Dakota.  They’d probably expand into the other thinly populated states over the next few months, even though they were apparently running into heavy human resistance.  The Mormons in Salt Lake City were armed to the teeth and determined to resist the alien landings, even though the aliens had sealed off the city and barred any human from leaving.  The fighting was spreading out of control, yet it would always be a low-level conflict, unless the human race somehow unlocked the secrets of alien technology and fought back.  He remembered the hidden nuclear submarines, with their deadly cargos, waiting for targets.  Even if they all fired on the alien settlements, the aliens would probably shoot down all the missiles before they could detonate.  It was hard to remain optimistic in the bunker.  His surroundings pushed at his mind, convincing him that there was no hope, not even a chance of escape into civilian life.

They’d told him that the President was a symbol, the Head of State as well as the Head of Government.  The President’s word counted, they’d said; his orders to surrender would be accepted, if he issued such orders.  He had no illusions about his treatment if he fell into alien hands, or his ability to resist.  They’d have him ordering a surrender within a few days, unless he managed to kill himself first – of course, with their technology, they could probably create a virtual President and have him issue the order to surrender.  The people probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference; hell, he wasn't sure if there was a difference.  There were times when the President’s job consisted of little more than patting people on the head and promising them that it was all going to be fine.  He knew better.  It wasn't going to be fine at all.

The collaborators – the Quislings, an old word dusted off and put back into service – certainly felt that nothing was ever going to be the same again.  There were reports of thousands of people serving the aliens now, from political leaders who probably felt that they had no choice, to people who could have walked away and done nothing.  The aliens had put out an announcement, a day after their landings, and ordered all bureaucrats to return to service, with an implied or else.  Thousands had gone back to work in the cities, trying to sort out the chaos caused by the landing…and, just incidentally, make it easier for the aliens to maintain control.  The President had been flabbergasted to discover just how much information was held by the government on each and every citizen, even – perhaps especially – on those who were trying to remain unnoticed.  The information had been ordered destroyed, but in the chaos of the final days of the war, it was quite possible that much of it remained intact.  The aliens would be able to use it to find other collaborators, or resistance fighters.  They might even be able to use it to find him!

There was no way to know for sure.  The bunker should have been wiped from the records and the computer hard drives destroyed, but what if they hadn’t been?  What if the aliens had captured the Pentagon records intact?  There were several sets of duplicates stored within Washington DC and the aliens might have stumbled across them, or perhaps their Quislings might have pointed them in the right direction.  They might even have located the network of bunkers, storage points and weapons dumps that had been established towards the end of the war.  What if they were already on their way?  He shook his head angrily.  There was no point in worrying about what might be going on in alien minds.  It was a sure route to madness.

He looked back down at the computer and sighed.  The internet was still running, mercifully, but no one expected that to last.  The main trunk lines over America and the rest of the world still worked, allowing him to send messages to the resistance, yet no matter how much he wished to do so, he couldn’t take direct command.  How could he?  The aliens might be able to use it to trace him back to the bunker, or round up the other insurgent groups.  Semi-leaderless resistance was the only way forward, but he knew that coordinating thousands of different insurgent groups would be difficult, if not impossible.  No insurgency had ever driven a determined occupation force out, ever.  The key to winning an insurgency lay in breaking the enemy’s will to carry on the fighting and how could they do that to the aliens?  The logic of the situation seemed inescapable.  The aliens had nowhere else to go.  They couldn’t break off and abandon Earth.

Bastards, he thought, tiredly.  Pepper was running late and that was worrying.  Only one person outside the small protective force knew that he was in Mannington, yet there were plenty of other things that could have happened to her.  The irony gnawed at him.  Once, he’d been an Army officer with a promising career ahead of him.  Now, he lurked in a bunker, afraid to show his face.  He was dependent upon her and he knew it.  If it wasn't for her…

***
The residents of Mannington all seemed to wear the same solemn expression, Pepper noted, trying to ignore the glances that followed her as she walked back to the house.  They made her nervous, not because they were lustful male glances, but because they were clearly wondering who the stranger was in their midst.  Small towns tended to be more than a little clannish and suspicious of outsiders, even at the best of time.  Three months ago, the residents might have been mistrustful of the Federal Government, even as they staunchly upheld the values of American civilisation.  Now…now there were aliens in Washington and collaborators appearing everywhere.  They would be fearful of anyone who might upset the balance and attract the aliens to their town.

In the distance, she knew, the residents had set up roadblocks, intent on keeping looters and refugees out of their own.  The aliens might have put the main cities into lockdown, but tens of thousands of people had fled before the aliens landed, camping out in the countryside or hiring hotels in small towns.  With money increasingly worthless and supplies at risk of running short, local towns and villages were taking desperate measures to protect themselves, even at risk of breaking the law.  It had once been illegal to set up roadblocks without permission.  She doubted that the aliens would care enough to force Mannington’s local defence force to take them down.  In some ways, it helped – the last thing she wanted was an influx of people who might threaten the President’s safety.  In other ways, it was a nuisance.  If food and supplies really started to run short, she knew the visitors and guests would be the first to be evicted and sent out into the countryside to die.

She caught sight of Sheriff Chris French and waved at him, noting how enthusiastically he waved back.  French’s family had been in secret government service for over sixty years – his grandfather had been a Secret Service agent – and they’d been entrusted with the secret of the bunker.  He was the only person in Mannington who knew about the President’s presence and wouldn’t breathe a word to a soul.  He was also organising the teenage males from the High School into a small army for when the aliens or their collaborators finally came to call, although Pepper suspected that they’d be wiser not to resist openly.  The aliens had wiped the floor with the most formidable military force in history.  They wouldn’t have any problems destroying Mannington and, without even knowing what they had done, killing the President.  Perhaps they thought he was dead already.  It might explain the absence of a concentrated search effort.

There was nothing particularly special about the house, save only that its door looked thicker than normal.  A team of experts had designed it years ago and installed all kinds of concealed defences – Pepper had been astonished when she’d first read the briefing papers – and since then, it had been nothing more than a holiday home, at least on the surface.  She stepped inside and, out of habit, went through the entire house before slipping down into the basement and through the secret door that led to the bunker.  She pressed her fingertips against the sensor and smiled in relief as it accepted her identity.  It wouldn’t have been the first time that a highly complex piece of software had failed for no apparent reason, or proven impossible to fix.

She frowned as she stepped into the bunker, feeling a gust of cold air brushing across her face.  The entire system had one major weakness and that was that there was no escape tunnel.  The engineers who’d built the whole complex – somehow without alerting the town to its existence – hadn’t been able to install one without risking all their hard labour.  If the aliens ever occupied Mannington directly, they’d be able to trap and capture – or kill – the President.  She wasn't happy about that at all, but unless they could move the President elsewhere without attracting attention, there was no other choice.

“Pepper,” the President said.  He was seated at the computer, staring at the screen without seeing it.  He looked tired and worn, even though he followed a rigorous exercise program every day.  “Anything from the surface?”

“Nothing new,” Pepper said.  She made a habit of walking around every day, just to get a feel for the area, even though it had risks.  It drew attention to her and that was unwelcome.  “There doesn’t seem to be any major change.”

There was a chime from the radio before the President could answer.  The main media networks had gone down in the wake of the aliens shooting down the satellites, although streaming internet video and some other systems had kept some major players going.  The BBC still broadcast from London.  The US media had been largely replaced by the internet and talk radio, but both of them were somewhat unreliable.  It made no real change.

“This is the Emergency Broadcasting System,” a voice said.  “Please stand by for a message from the President.”

They exchanged puzzled glances.  The aliens had used the EBS before to issue orders, but they had never broadcast a message from the President.  How could they?

The voice on the airwaves was terrifyingly familiar.  “My fellow Americans,” he said.  Pepper recognised Jacob Thornton’s voice at once.  “A major crisis has arisen in our affairs.  We must adapt ourselves to the new realities that face us…”

Pepper saw the horrified look on the President’s face as his former Vice President continued to speak, the poisonous words rolling out one after the other, each one hitting Pepper in the heart.  It distracted her from her principle, a lapse that her trainers would have reprimanded her for, yet she couldn’t help it.  She had grown used to the idea of betrayal from people who were weak, or had no choice, but the Vice President…the war against the aliens had just become a civil war.

“All government employees are ordered to return to work at once,” Thornton concluded.  “There will be further bulletins as events warrant.”

“Turn it off,” the President snarled, as the message began to repeat.  “That’s not him.”

Pepper keyed the radio off.  “That’s not him?”

The President’s mouth ground wordlessly.  “That’s his voice, that’s his mouth, but it’s not him,” he snarled.  “Jacob had no love for fucking fancy talking, any more than I had.  He was always one to say just what he meant, to call it as he saw it.”  His voice hardened.  “We must adapt to the new realities facing us…that’s not Jacob’s way of speaking.  Someone put those words in his mouth and made him say them.”

Pepper saw.  “At gunpoint?”

“More likely with his family being held at gunpoint,” the President said, before shaking his head.  “No…I don’t think he spoke those words of his free will at all.  We never did figure out what they had in mind when they abducted humans and took them to their polar base, but learning how to control humans…yes, that would make sense.  They captured him somehow, either by luck or careful planning, and took control of his mind.  Shit!”

“My God,” Pepper said.  It added a whole new dimension to the war.  The collaborators…no one would know if they were acting of their own free will, or if the aliens had put them under control.  “How many people are going to follow the Vice President if they think he’s working with the aliens?”

“The Vice President is normally about as useful as tits on a bull,” the President growled.  “Now…now I don’t know.”  For the first time since Pepper had known him, he looked old.  “I don’t know at all.”
Chapter Four

Washington DC, USA (Occupied)
Day 98

I wonder if I’m making a mistake…

General (Retired) Dave Howery stopped as he approached the heart of alien activity in Washington, a set of hotels that had been cleared of their guests – those who had remained in the city after the war began – and handed over to the collaborator government by the aliens.  A set of alien warriors had sealed off the area and were denying access to anyone who didn’t have a specific ID Card or permission to enter the complex.  It didn’t have the majesty of the White House or the Senate, but both of those buildings were nothing more than piles of rubble, at least until they could be rebuilt.  Somehow, Dave doubted that the aliens would bother.

The message had been clear.  He was ordered to present himself at the complex at a certain time.  It hadn’t included any threats or dire warnings of what would happen if he refused, but it didn’t take a genius to know that if the aliens decided he’d refused to show up, they’d take it out on his family.  They’d stockpiled food and drink before the panic set in, yet that wouldn’t last forever, even if the aliens left them alone.  He’d made one mistake in not getting out of the city before it was too late and now…now he was a prisoner, as much as anyone else in Washington.  The thought made him smile as the alien warriors ran a sensor over his body and checked his ID.  The collaborators might think otherwise, but they were prisoners too.  If they displeased their new masters, all they’d have to do is let them go and allow the humans on the outside to take care of them.  Two days ago, a collaborator – a former social worker who’d been charged with distributing food supplies to the humans within the city – had been skinned alive by someone.  No one knew if it was resistance activity or just a sadistic murderer, but everyone was on edge.  The collaborators watched their backs with care.  They knew that they could expect no mercy from their fellow humans.

A girl, barely out of her teens, was waiting for him as he was waved through the gate.  She looked oddly familiar, although he couldn’t place her.  She certainly looked cleaner than his own daughter, yet that was merely because she’d had unlimited access to hot running water, while everyone outside the collaborators had only limited access.  Dave wasn't sure if the aliens were doing that because they wanted to encourage people to collaborate, or because they hadn’t fixed the water systems yet, or if they just didn’t care.  The leader-aliens didn’t seem to have noses.  They smelled terrible as well.  The thought made him smile and he saw the girl flinch.  She didn’t want to be where she was, any more than Dave did.

“Follow me,” she said, and turned to lead him up the stairs.  “The Director is waiting for you.”

Something clicked in Dave’s mind.  “You’re the girl who discovered the bastards!”

“And you’re the General who wanted to invade Canada,” the girl said.  Her name was…Karen, if he recalled correctly.  He was so pleased with remembering that he almost missed her next words.  “I wish you’d fled Washington with the rest of them.”

“Me too,” Dave said.  “Which Director wants to see me?”

“The Director of Human Resources,” Karen said.  “Follow me.”

The interior of the hotel was a striking look at how the rich and famous lived.  He hadn’t seen so much gold and gilt since he’d been in Baghdad and occupied one of Saddam’s famous palaces, built while millions of his own people had starved to death.  Hundreds of humans milled about, some clearly collaborators, some clearly servants…and some, like Karen, who didn’t look happy to be there.  They passed a line of naked girls as they descended the stairs, heading down to…where?  It made no sense at all.

“Jesus,” he muttered, barely loud enough for Karen to hear.  “It’s like they’re having an orgy.”

“They are having an orgy,” Karen said.  Her voice was very soft, but he could hear an underlying current of bitterness.  “The defenders of the new order need their entertainment after a hard day’s work.  Those girls…it’s work on their backs, or be blazed.  Not much of a choice.”

Dave said nothing as they reached a massive set of doors.  At a guess, it was one of the suites for the very rich and famous, although if he’d been rich and famous, he wouldn’t have wanted to strut around in Washington, not when he could have retired to somewhere well away from the remainder of the human race.  It opened at Karen’s touch, revealing an alien leader and a pair of workers.  Dave stared, unable to help himself.  It was the first time he’d seen an alien in person and the massive dark eyes captivated him.  The alien seemed to be looking deep into his very soul, before it made a slight inclination of its great head and strode off, followed by the two workers.

It was suddenly a struggle to speak.  “Who…what…?”

“One of their liaison officers to the provisional government,” Karen said.  Dave was frankly amazed that she could say that with a straight face.  A liaison officer was military shorthand for superior officer.  They always thought they knew best and issued orders whenever the mood struck them.  “And his servants.”

“I see,” Dave said, as Karen led him towards a second door.  “And they make full use of the facilities?”

“They seem to like the swimming pool,” Karen said.  “I’ve seen dozens of them splashing around, tossing water at each other like little kids.  I don’t think they make any other use of the facilities here.”

“The mind boggles,” Dave said.  The door read DIRECTOR OF HUMAN RESOURCES.  The mindset behind it appalled him.  The aliens meant it in a whole new way.  “Why…?”

Karen caught his arm.  “Agree to whatever they want,” she said, sharply.  “Good luck.”

The door swung open, revealing a surprisingly small office.  “General Howery, Director,” Karen said.  “I thought…”

“Thank you, Karen,” the Director said.  She barely looked up from the file she was reading.  “You are dismissed.”

Dave took a moment to study her, half-amused by how she was pretending to read the file.  It was a very old dominance game, played by almost everyone who had been promoted above their level of competence.  Summon the subordinate, he knew, and then do something to make it clear that their time is not as important as yours.  It never seemed to change.  The Director – Daisy Fairchild, he remembered – looked like a ball-buster, but one of the good kind, the ones who would go the extra mile themselves if necessary.  Somehow, he wasn't surprised that someone from SETI would end up working for the aliens.  They had always worshipped the possibility of alien life.

“You have a very interesting career,” Daisy said, without preamble.  She placed the file on her desk in the perfect position for him to read the title, and wince inwardly.  It was a copy of a Pentagon file, which meant…that the aliens had captured at least some of the Pentagon’s records.  Personnel files weren't as critical as some, but it was a disturbing sign.  “You joined the army, streamlined into combat infantry, served in Panama, Afghanistan and Iraq, commanded a unit in some unpronounceable city for a couple of years, recalled home to serve as a training officer, held a command position in the briefly-reconstructed Continental Command…and retired under something of a cloud.  Would you care to explain why?”

Dave made a motion toward the file.   “It should all be in there, Director,” he said.

“Oh, please don’t call me Director,” Daisy said.  “You’ll make me feel old.  Call me Daisy if you have to call me anything.  And I would like to hear the answer from your own mouth.”

“There was this…terrorist group who appeared in the north back before I retired,” Dave said, finally.  “They shot people, placed bombs and generally caused havoc, even though their media groupies tried to turn them into heroes.  The military ended up playing a role in dealing with them.  Towards the end, we realised that their funding came directly from Canada and radical groups there…and the Canucks weren’t going to do anything about it.  I took it public and advised that we prepare at once for an invasion of Canada.  The then-President didn’t appreciate my attitude and I was told that it would be a good thing if I retired before I caused a diplomatic incident.”

It still hurt, years afterwards.  He hadn’t been the one taking pot-shots at innocent American civilians.  No country could be allowed to support, even though omission, attacks on American civilians, yet the government had nearly allowed Canada to get away with it.  Only the massive public protest and the economic damage had convinced Canada’s socialist government to take harsh measures against their unwanted guests.  Canada hadn’t even experienced a wave of terrorist attacks after plucking up their courage and taking out the bastards.

“We have a specific task for you,” Daisy said, firmly.  “The world has changed.  The People have…occupied parts of America, but we need a human armed force serving alongside them to…ah, make it easier for humans to accept their presence.  We have hundreds of volunteers to serve as their soldiers, but they need leadership.  We’re looking to you to provide that leadership.”

Karen’s words echoed in his head.  Agree to whatever they want…

“I see,” he said, finally.  “You want me to serve as a…Benedict Arnold?”

“We want you to be realistic,” Daisy said.  “The People are here.  We’re never going to get rid of them.  We have to adapt and make ourselves useful to convince them that the human race serves their purpose by being alive.  This isn’t a war against the Chinese, or the Russians, but an alien power.  The entire world has changed!  We need you to prevent the world from becoming any worse.”

She held his eyes.  “There have been hundreds of resistance acts over the last few days,” she said.  “So far, the aliens have refrained from reprisals, but how long will it be before they choose to simply hit back?  We need you to prevent that day from ever coming?”

There was a long pause.  “What do you say?”

“I was thinking,” Dave said.  She’d tempted him, all right, tempted him with a return to command rank and a chance to create an army of his own, but he had no intention of accepting.  Briefly, he considered faking his allegiance and biding his time, but it was a high-risk plan with a significant chance of failure…and then his family would suffer.  “I, Dave Howery, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

“The Founding Fathers didn’t anticipate an alien invasion of the United States,” Daisy snapped.  “The Constitution is not a suicide pact!”

“No, it isn’t,” Dave agreed.  “I served my country well for years, even if my country decided to disperse with my services rather than piss off a bunch of cowardly terrorists and their allies.  You’re asking me to betray all that just to serve the enemy and bring my country under their heel.  That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“I’m talking about adapting to new realities,” Daisy said, controlling herself with an effort.  “I’m talking about…”

“Treason,” Dave countered.  “I won’t have a part in it.”

”You don’t have a choice,” Daisy said.  “Your family…”

Dave went for her, hands outstretched to snap her neck, but a massive shape crashed into him and knocked him to the ground.  The alien warrior had appeared out of nowhere and tackled him.  Dave prided himself on his situational awareness and the alien had sneaked up on him…or had it teleported in?  No, they weren’t that advanced…

“I’m sorry,” Daisy said, “but I meant it.  You don’t have a choice.”

The alien warrior pulled a long thin rod off its belt and pushed it against Dave’s head.  There was a brief moment of…discontinuity…and he found himself lying on a bed, unable to move anything below his head.  He was in darkness, yet he was somehow sure that there were shapes within that darkness, chilling his blood.  They were half-seen at best and his imagination filled in the details.  Anything could be lurking in the darkness, waiting to spring.

“All right,” he said.  His voice sounded pitiful and weak in his own ears.  “What do you want?”

A looming shape in the darkness revealed itself as one of the worker aliens, but with a larger head and long delicate fingers.  “We want your allegiance,” he said.  There was a faint note of something…inhuman in his voice.  “Your race has a problem.  Obedience does not come easily to you.”

Dave stared at the alien.  “This country was founded on disobedience,” he said, finally.  “What are you going to do to me?”

“Your people do not have the proper habits of obedience,” the alien said.  A brilliant green light shone down from overhead, illuminating Dave’s body as he lay on the bed.  “You will be taught the virtues of control and understanding.  You will learn to obey.”

“Obey?”  Dave asked.  “Obey who?”

“Obey your leaders,” the alien informed him.  A pencil-thin beam of blue light appeared out of the darkness and stabbed down at his head.  Dave suddenly felt as if his mind was floating freely above his body.  “You will learn that this is all for your own good.”

“Wait,” he said, desperately.  There was something about the beam of light that unmanned him completely.  “I’ll serve you.  I’ll work for you.  I’ll obey you…”

“You do not have the proper habit of obedience,” the alien repeated.  “Your race has a problem.  Those we wish to serve us do not wish to serve us and believe that they can plot against us.  You were offered your chance to serve in good faith, yet we could not allow you to leave without agreeing to serve.  You are ours now.”

The beam of blue light suddenly became painful and Dave blacked out.

***
He was sitting in a chair, feeling calm and relaxed.  It should have alarmed him – he knew, somehow, that it should have alarmed him – yet he felt completely at peace.  The world was passing by outside, yet…his mind was drifting, remembering happier times and places, the birth of his children, the graduation into the Army, the happy days with his father before the old man died…

A voice echoed into his mind.  “Who are you?”

“Dave,” he said.  It seemed as if he’d made a massive breakthrough, as if the fog surrounding his mind was lifting slowly, revealing a whole new world.  “I am Dave Howery.”

“Welcome back, Dave,” the voice said.  It sounded as if it loved him.  “You’ve been asleep a long time.”

Dave smiled, dreamily.  “Who are you?”  He asked.  “Show yourself.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave,” the voice said.  There was a hint of amusement in its tone.  “You will have to open your eyes.”

Dave hadn’t even realised that they were closed.  He opened them and found himself staring up into a pair of dark eyes.  The alien leaned back and beckoned Dave to his feet.  Dave didn’t want to look away from the dark eyes.  Merely looking at them made him feel loved, as if he were part of something greater than humanity or even the People themselves.  He knew, at some level, that this should worry him, yet it didn’t.  It all felt perfectly natural.  It all felt right.

“Thank you,” he said.  He felt tears trickling down his cheeks, even though he didn’t know why he was crying.  Nothing felt right.  Everything felt right.  “Thank you.”

***
Abigail watched from her position as the reporters were herded into the conference room.  Only a handful of reporters had survived the invasion – a surprising number, she’d discovered, had decided that they had to go cover events outside the city – and the provisional government had ordered them all to work to distribute news and official bulletins to the American population.  Defiance wasn't an option.  A handful of people had refused alien orders and had just been left to starve.  Those who engaged in open resistance were killed, or taken away and never seen again.  Washington was rapidly becoming a police state in all, but name.  A handful of the police had even gone to work for the aliens.

It was easy to look at the collaborators and hate them, yet she was part of the machine as well.  She and her fellow reporters couldn’t resist any longer.  The collaborators might have been evil from the start, desperate for power at any cost, or they might have been forced into serving the aliens.  How could she tell, she wondered, and what was the difference between collaborators and herself?  There was none.

“I have an important announcement to make,” the Vice President said.  At one point, Jacob Thornton had made excellent stories.  He never minced his words.  Now he sounded as if he were a child actor reading a bad script.  “I present to you the new commander of the United States Army, General Dave Howery!”

Abigail had seen General Howery on television before, back after the mothership had first been detected.  He’d struck her as an interesting man, yet now…now, he looked tired and worn…and conflicted.  She couldn’t imagine him serving the aliens willingly, but looking at the way he gazed at them, it was easy to tell that he was loyal.  He looked as if he would die for them.

Just for a moment, she locked eyes with him and saw something else there, something screaming deep inside his mind.  General Howery was damned and in hell.

And, worst of all, he knew it.
Chapter Five

Alien POW Camp, Virginia, USA
Day 100

Second Lieutenant Michael Francis Carey picked himself off the ground as the sun rose above the horizon, sending rays of light into the POW camp.  Nothing had changed in the night, nor had the POW camp been revealed as anything other than a bad dream.  He’d faced the possibility of being captured by terrorists or insurgents, in Iraq or Afghanistan or any one of a hundred little countries on the verge of falling to horror and death, but he’d never seriously expected to be captured on American soil.  It was the stuff of bad right-wing novels and movies.  No enemy possessed the capability to launch an invasion of America.

And then the aliens had arrived and the world had turned upside down.

He looked over towards one of the alien warriors, pacing around the outside of the fence, and glared at it.  If the alien noticed, he gave no sign, but then, they paid little attention to the four hundred soldiers they’d captured and stuffed into their POW camp.  They’d sorted out the soldiers, removed anyone of high rank to another location – unless they’d liquidated them at once, which remained a very real possibility – and then just abandoned them.  They’d even given the humans some medical care, better than they could have expected from any more conventional foe, and some entertainment.  It was ironic.  After all the horror stories about what happened to captured American soldiers in the Sandbox, he’d been captured by alien horrors who respected the Geneva Conventions far better than most humans.  The worst danger in the camp was boredom.

Michael had been stationed at Quantico when the aliens had descended and invested the Marine Corps base.  The fighting had spread rapidly out of control, with Marines struggling to repel the attack, before something had exploded far too close to his position and knocked him out.  When he recovered, he discovered that he was in a transit camp run by the aliens and a handful of humans who had been press-ganged into service.  The handful of other prisoners had told him that the remaining free Marines had dispersed into the countryside to carry on the war, leaving the base in alien hands – along with thousands of prisoners and dead Marines.  He hoped that the aliens had had the time to give them a proper burial, but he had to admit that it was unlikely.  Invaders probably had no time to worry about human burial concepts.

“Food, sir,” the Sergeant said.  The Master Sergeant had served in the Marine Corps for years.  The junior officers had privately joked that he had walked from the shores of Tripoli to the Halls of Montezuma, remaining in service to ensure that each successive crop of Marines retained the virtues and ethos of the Marine Corps.  The aliens might not have realised that Sergeants – even Second Lieutenants – could be dangerous, even when deprived of their superior officers.  If it wasn't for the fence, and a complete absence of weapons and tools, they would have been out in seconds and away before the aliens could react.  “Eat up.”

“Thank you,” Michael said, taking the bowl of alien food.  It had been universally nicknamed gruel by the humans, regardless of which branch of the armed forces they came from.  It had accomplished the astonishing feat of making MREs seem palatable.  The handful of human doctors who had been pressed into service confirmed that it provided all of the essential nutrients and suchlike that humans required, but they could do nothing about the taste.  It was probably a subtle attempt to demoralise them…and he had to admit that it was working.  The four hundred soldiers, a mixture of men and women from every branch of the services, were slowly coming apart at the seams.

After he had eaten the bowl – there was always enough food, even if no one wanted to eat more than the bare minimum – he accompanied the Sergeant on an inspection tour of the camp.  The aliens didn’t bother to exercise any supervision of the interior, leaving the humans completely to their own devices.  Despite having different views on how to serve, the humans had come closer together, mainly through trying to figure out how to escape.  No one knew what the aliens had in mind as their eventual fate, but no one believed that it would be pleasant.  The odds were that they would either be killed, like the Russians or Germans had gunned down prisoners in World War Two, or put to work as slave labour.  The debates over why an advanced race would need or want slave labour had gone on long into the nights, but the Sergeant had pointed out that some people got a kick out of having slaves, even if the slaves were inefficient compared to paid servants or machines.  The aliens might be more like humanity than either side cared to admit.

There was one building in the complex and hundreds of army-issue tents, taken – he suspected – from one of the National Guard storage dumps in the state.  The building served as both the medical centre and the latrines, with a constant queue of soldiers lining up to go to the toilet.  Normally, they would have dug latrines into the ground to provide additional toilet space, but the aliens had declined to provide them with shovels or any other kind of tools.  Anyone would think that they feared the humans would use them to dig a tunnel and escape!  The thought made him smile bitterly as he stepped into the medical centre and winced at the smell.  It was worse than a field hospital on deployment, almost primitive.  The aliens might have provided medical care, but it wasn't enough for some.  They’d be recovering for years, if they recovered at all.

He caught sight of one of the doctors and winced again.  Months ago, wearing a stained uniform and using improvised tools would be grounds for real trouble, if not immediate dismissal in disgrace.  Now, it was the best they had.  There were only two combat medics in the camp; the other four doctors were civilians, scooped up by the aliens two days after he’d been captured.  One of them had worked in an inner city hospital and was familiar with trauma and gunshot wounds, but the other three had all been country doctors.  They hadn’t been prepared for the sheer intensity of the POW camp.  He found himself clenching his fists in sheer helpless rage.  He wanted to wring the neck of every alien in the whole damned universe, yet he could do nothing.  He had never felt so helpless in his life, even when, as a new recruit, the Drill Sergeant had chewed him out for leaving a button undone on his uniform.  Everything had been simpler then.

“We’re running out of supplies,” the doctor said, shortly.  He looked as if he was on the verge of collapsing at any moment.  Michael could hardly blame him.  No one understood why the aliens had healed some people – himself included – and yet hadn’t completed the task.  They were alien and that was all there was to it.  If there was a reason for their actions, it made no sense to humans.  “Can you talk to them…?”

Michael shrugged.  “They don’t seem to care about listening to us,” he said.  The POWs had tried to talk to their captors before, but the aliens never responded, even the tall dark aliens that sent shivers down the spine of anyone who met their eyes.  He wasn’t even sure if the hulking warriors could talk.  They never spoke to each other, let alone their human captives.  “I don’t think they give a damn about us.”

The doctor nodded.  “Does anyone give a damn about us?”

Michael said nothing.  He knew – or believed – that places like Camp Pendleton and Fort Hood were too large to be overrun easily, allowing the soldiers a chance to break out and disperse into the surrounding area to carry on the war – hell, SF soldiers were trained in insurgency warfare and slowing down enemy pursuit.  The POW camp couldn’t be the only POW camp in America, yet there had to be thousands of soldiers out there, free and fighting to regain their country’s independence.  The aliens wouldn’t be allowed to operate at will…

Or perhaps they had defeated the entire country and there was nothing left, but eternal slavery.  He had tried to keep his hopes up when he’d spoken to the soldiers, but in the privacy of his own head, the visions of a subjected America refused to fade.  It couldn’t be the end of the republic; the American Dream would live on…or would it?  Perhaps he was deluding himself and it was the end.  Perhaps…

“I don’t know, doctor,” he said.  It was time for roll call, yet part of him wondered why they bothered.  The aliens might have mixed and matched units purely to assist in breaking them, as the Sergeant had pointed out.  “I just don’t know.”

***
Nicolas Little lay under cover and stared at the POW camp through a pair of binoculars.  The aliens might have been very alien, yet their POW camp design might have come out of a human manual on how to build a simple POW camp.  It would have provoked outrage and horror from the people who believed that war could be tamed and civilised – there was little in the way of medical care or entertainment for the prisoners – but he doubted that the aliens would be worried.  An op-ed in the New York Times meant nothing to them.  It served the single purpose of keeping POWs off the streets and it did that very well.

The aliens had fenced in a vast area and given the humans tents, with four watchtowers at each corner.  They didn’t seem to have subdivided the camp into smaller sections, as some American POW camps had done back in Iraq, but perhaps they felt no particular need to further isolate the prisoners from each other.  The soldiers would have broken out by now if they had tools or equipment, but without anything of the sort, they were trapped.  He’d heard of POWs using their bare hands to dig under the fence, yet close examination proved that any attempt to do that would certainly be detected a long time before they could escape.  Besides, the aliens had probably rammed the fence down into the ground, just to make sure.  There was no way to know.  The only way the prisoners would be getting out would be through outside rescue.

Good thing I brought along plenty of firepower, Nicolas thought wryly, as he crawled backwards away from the camp.  Four of his team had inspected the camp over the last few days and one of them, a Ranger with a history of successfully infiltrating enemy-controlled areas, had never returned.  The aliens ran random patrols around the camp and had probably stumbled over him, although there was no way to know unless they liberated the Ranger from the POW camp.  He’d inspected the faces of every POW he could see in the camp and found no trace of him.  He had recognised a few old friends and comrades, all of which had made him more determined to knock over the camp as soon as possible.

The aliens didn’t seem to pay attention to anything going on further away from the camp, but he kept low anyway, just in case they decided to change their minds.  The orders filtering through the network had warned him to knock out the camp if he could – the prisoners would be a useful addition to the resistance’s fighting power – yet the final decision lay with him.  There were only twenty men prepared to attack the camp – it would take days to get more fighting power into the area, now that the aliens were expanding their control still further – and if they failed…he shook his head.  The aliens wouldn’t be expecting trouble.  They’d get in, hit the camp, liberate the prisoners, and run for their lives.  It would work.  It had to work.

He’d bivouacked the group in a small barn established near the POW camp, under strict discipline.  They’d encountered a handful of locals who’d told them that the aliens showed little interest in their activities, but still…Nicolas hoped that they wouldn’t be blamed for the attack.  Human history held plenty of examples of horrific reprisals carried out by occupying powers against local populations.  In World War Two, partisans had successfully killed Reinhard Heydrich, one of the worst Nazis at the time.  The nearest town had been completely destroyed by German forces in reprisal for the assassination.  The occupation forces in Iraq had been far more civilised, yet the local population had been at risk when insurgents had used their towns and cities as bases to launch their attacks.  The poor bastards had been caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.

“Great Bloater,” he said, as he crossed a half-visible line in the ground.  The password had been picked completely at random, which should prevent the aliens or one of their collaborators from unlocking any cultural references and guessing the correct response.  “And you?”

“Bloated and blotted,” a voice said.  A figure seemed to materialise out of nowhere.  The Sergeant wore civilian clothes, yet somehow he couldn’t quite disguise his origins.  “Welcome back, sir.”

Nicolas stepped into the barn and relaxed slightly.  Gathering the team together in one place was risky, but there was little other choice.  Their standard equipment couldn’t be used so close to an alien base.  No power on Earth had been able to intercept – or often detect – microburst transmissions from Special Forces equipment – but no one knew if the aliens could detect them.  If they could, they’d tip the aliens off to their presence – they might as well send a calling card promising to attack at noon.  The only hope of success lay in surprise.

“They haven’t upgraded the camp’s defences,” he said, shortly.  They’d patterned out the camp over the last few days and drawn up an excellent chart of its outline.  The only mystery was what was in the single building.  He’d given some thought to trying to pick up an alien – or a human collaborator – and sweating them for information, but no one knew how to interrogate an alien…and no human collaborators seemed to be involved with the camp.  It was a smart move on the part of the aliens.  He happened to know that a handful of collaborators were not all they seemed.  “We attack in three hours – mark.”

There was no dispute.  They might have preferred a night assault, but one thing that had been made clear in hundreds of tiny engagements was that the alien night vision equipment was vastly superior to humanity’s best technology.  Or, for all he knew, they actually had perfect night vision themselves.  He missed the days when he was facing incompetent terrorists who thought nothing of smoking in the dark, or left their computers and systems unprotected.  The aliens were holding down his entire country.  They seemed invincible…yet he’d seen one of their massive command ships crashing to the earth in Washington.  They were powerful, they could do things that humanity couldn’t, but they were not gods.  Their technology could be unlocked and turned against them.

His lips twitched.  Information from the internet was always dubious, yet it was clear that the aliens had landed in North Africa and the Middle East, landing massive settlements in the former.  They’d be experiencing the joys of an Islamic insurgency by now, one aided by the American and British troops that had been stationed in the Middle East.  The thought of Iran and Saudi Arabia as allies was oddly amusing, although if pressed he had to admit that he preferred the former to the latter.  They might have hated America and everything it stood for, but at least it was a honest hatred.  Fifteen out of nineteen of the 9/11 hijackers had been Saudis.

“Yes, sir,” the Sergeant said, after they had gone over their respective roles – and the escape plan.  The support units were already in place, but Nicolas had contingency plans if something went wrong.  The resistance couldn’t command obedience from its disparate units…and the entire country was badly screwed up.  The support units might be out of place through no fault of their own.  It was yet another reason to get the POWs liberated as soon as possible.  With the aliens developing their own human army, they’d be able to put entire divisions of human soldiers in the field soon enough.  “We’re ready.”

Nicolas nodded.  Seven of the team had served with him in Antarctica, others had been assigned to the resistance units before the Fall of Washington, but he had confidence in all of them.  The American Resistance would be the best prepared in history.  Even the stay-behind units NATO had established for dealing with a Warsaw Pact invasion wouldn’t compare.

“Good,” he said.  There was no point in bothering with words of encouragement.  They’d do it.  “Move out.”

He always thought of his daughter before a mission, remembering the blonde-haired princess she’d been the last time he’d seen her.  The thought comforted him as he slipped back towards his position, knowing that snipers, missile teams and the handful of others were preparing to back him up.  The aliens looked as if they hadn’t noticed anything out of the ordinary.  They were feeding the humans – he’d timed the offensive so that the POWs would be fed before they were liberated – but otherwise, everything was proceeding normally.  They were about to pay for their confidence.

“Take aim,” he muttered.  The resistance was committed now.  It was do or die time.  The snipers would take out the alien soldiers on patrol, but how quickly could they react?  No one knew for sure.  “Fire!”
Chapter Six

Alien POW Camp, Virginia, USA
Day 100

Michael heard the noise and threw himself to the ground before his brain caught up and identified it.  A second later, one of the watchtowers exploded, blowing a burning alien body down towards the ground.  He saw a streak of light flash overhead and destroy a second watchtower, followed rapidly by the other two.  The camp was under attack!

“Stay down,” he shouted, although he doubted that he could be heard over the shooting.  The prisoners had no weapons or ammunition.  If the POWs stood up, they might be gunned down by accident, or perhaps the aliens would try to kill them to prevent them being rescued.  “Keep your heads down and wait!”

He heard, for the first time, an alien voice as alien warriors desperately tried to counter-attack.  They’d been caught out in the open and were now mercilessly being shot down by their unseen attackers.  He saw one of the aliens roll over and start firing bursts of blinding light into the cover, but he couldn’t see what the alien was shooting at, if anything.  Perhaps the alien himself didn’t know.  A sniper put a shot through the alien’s head and he collapsed to the ground.  A pair of aliens rushed towards the human position and were shot down.  The remainder were falling back in fairly good order.  It wouldn’t be long before they came back with reinforcements and started clearing out the humans one by one.  

The POW camp had been badly damaged, but the fence was still intact.  It was too strong to be torn down by human hands, even if they all pushed at it.  He hoped – prayed – that the resistance or whoever could free them before the aliens returned, or they were all dead.  Somehow, he doubted that the aliens would just regard a rescue attempt as a harmless prank.

***
Nicolas took careful aim at the last alien and saw him collapse under his shot.  The alien warriors had been wiped out, apart from a handful who were retreating rapidly and laying down covering fire as they moved.  The resistance could have taken them, but they hadn’t come to kill aliens, even alien warriors.  God alone knew how much time they had before alien reinforcements arrived and drove them away.

He keyed his radio – there was no point in not using it now – and barked an order.  “Group One, with me.  Group Two, watch our backs!”

The radio buzzed once.  Nicolas nodded, jumped up, and ran down towards the fence…and the POWs waiting beyond.  They looked battered and desperate, yet there was new hope in their eyes.  He smiled in relief.  He’d rescued a handful of prisoners from terrorists and many of them had been badly treated by their captors, but the aliens didn’t seem to go in for sadism.  He remembered the human medical subjects at their base in Antarctica and mentally corrected himself.  They didn’t go in for sadism unless there was a purpose to it.  They didn’t torture for the fun of it, unlike some terrorists he’d captured or killed over the years.  Did that make the aliens more or less virtuous than the terrorists?

He pushed the thought out of his mind as he reached the fence.  He’d brought cutters with him and started cutting through the fence at once.  The aliens had probably liberated the wire from a National Guard deport or perhaps a police storage dump, because it was human-produced, not alien.  Cutting through it was a slow job, but with five men working on it, it was easy to tear their way through the wire.  He opened the first fence and walked through to the second, checking the ground as he moved.  If he had designed the POW camp, without any regard for liberal opinion, he would have scattered landmines between the two fences, just to deter anyone from climbing over and trying to escape.  The aliens clearly hadn’t thought of it, or perhaps they simply hadn’t bothered.  Nothing exploded and blew him into red mist.

“We came for you,” he yelled, as he started work on the next fence.  It would have been a lot easier with tractors or trucks to help tear the fence open, but the aliens had removed all human vehicles from the area.  The internet reports stated that they had pressed human vehicles into service – along, often enough, with human drivers – but not anywhere near the POW camp.  “The war’s not over yet!”

The first torrent of prisoners came pouring out of the camp as the fence broke, running for freedom.  Nicolas shouted orders and the handful of men who’d been prepared to serve as reception officers took command, rounding up POWs and directing them towards the support units, hidden away miles from the alien base.  They’d probably react harshly to any large number of people in the area, suspecting that they were escaped prisoners, but most of them would escape before the aliens could organise a cordon and start searching the area.  Once they reached the support units, they could be rearmed and sent to join resistance units.  He hoped there were a handful of training officers among the POWs.  The resistance had plenty of volunteers from civilian communities, but few of them had any military training.  They needed someone to show them the ropes.

He keyed his radio again.  “Check the aliens, strip them of anything interesting, and get it to the right location,” he said.  They didn’t dare risk precise statements over the radio.  A noted terrorist had been captured after he told his mother over a cell phone where he was hiding.  The aliens couldn’t be allowed to do the same to the resistance.  “And make sure they’re dead!”

“Over there,” the Sergeant said, waving him towards the single building.  A handful of POWs were trying to carry men on stretchers, escorted by a pair of men who were clearly civilians.  They might have been collaborators, but with the POWs nearby, it didn’t seem likely.  “Sir…”

Nicolas winced.  The wounded couldn’t be left in the camp.  The aliens might not kill them out of hand, but they’d beef up their security in all of the POW camps, those that survived the day.  Coordinating so many offences had been tricky, but if it had paid off, thousands of prisoners would be liberated before the aliens could react and lock down the camps.  If not…even a half-success would be welcome.  They desperately needed another victory.  Knocking down the big alien command ship hadn’t won the war.

“Round up some of the POWs and detail them to carry the wounded,” he ordered, flatly.  The wounded were going to have an unpleasant trip, but there was no choice, unless they wanted to remain behind in the camp.  “Tell the doctors that they’ve been press-ganged into the resistance and that they can’t go home again, not with the aliens breathing down their necks.  Move!”

He checked inside the building quickly, noting how primitive the entire medical centre had been, before abandoning it.  If there was time, his team would rig the complex with Claymore mines and other surprises to delay pursuit, even though the aliens would probably not bother to rebuild the POW camp.  They’d be more inclined to transport POWs to somewhere far more unfriendly – Alaska, perhaps.  There were far fewer official resistance movements in Alaska.

“Most of the prisoners are on their way,” the Sergeant reported.  “The fire teams are in position, but some of the prisoners want to stay behind and join them.”

“Denied,” Nicolas said.  They passed through the hole in the fence and left the POW camp behind.  He thought about setting fire to the tents and burning it to the ground, but there was little point.  We don’t need to risk more lives.”

His radio buzzed once.  “Incoming, sir,” the spotter said.  “Get ready…”

Nicolas ducked as an alien heavy transport materialised overhead.  It had been moving so fast that he hadn’t even realised that it was on its way until it had arrived.  There was no sonic boom – no one knew how the aliens did that – or any other warning, apart from the spotter’s report.  Alien warriors were already pouring out of the vessel’s underside, somehow floating rapidly to the ground.  Nicolas had gone through HALO training himself, but the aliens had a whole new twist, somehow.

He keyed his radio.  “Fire,” he ordered.  “Hit them!”

Two SAM missiles were launched by the MANPAD teams, directly towards the heavy transport.  The machine guns opened fire on the alien warriors, sending some of them falling to the ground, dead.  The heavy transport lit up like a Christmas tree as the missiles struck home, but somehow it remained in the air, turning to bring its weapons to bear on the imprudent humans who had dared to fire on it.  Nicolas threw himself to the ground as it pounded the resistance position, killing both of the antiaircraft team.  He pulled himself to his feet and kept moving as the alien craft moved on to the machine gun positions, ignoring their puny attempts to shoot it down with their weapons.  It’s drive field glinted and sparked as they fired on it, but there were no other effects.  

Nicolas keyed his radio quickly.  “Show a leg,” he snapped.  The code phase meant that it was time to leave, immediately.  “I repeat, show a leg!”

The alien craft opened fire again, pounding the machine gun nests into oblivion.  Nicolas hoped that the crews had escaped before they were killed, although he suspected that they’d kept firing till the last.  They couldn’t win a stand-up fight against the aliens, not without a hell of a lot more firepower and a weapon that would be guaranteed to work against their air support.  Apache helicopters would be easier to take down.  He fired at an alien head pursuing him and forced it to duck, before unhooking a grenade from his belt and throwing it at the alien.  An explosion announced that it had detonated, but he didn’t look back.  It was time to run.

He’d expected that the aliens would pursue with as much force as they could and he wasn’t disappointed.  Their heavy transport completed unloading its troops and then followed the retreating humans, tracking them from low level.  He guessed that the aliens wanted captives rather than dead humans, or they would have blown him and the rest of the fugitives away from high above.  It didn’t matter.  He’d prepared for their pursuit.  He kept running, hoping that the aliens would continue to follow the main group.  The waiting surprise would be ready for them.

A dark shadow fell over him as the alien craft drifted overhead.  Just for a moment, he felt a flicker of awe, for nothing human flew like that.  The aliens could have taught humanity so much, yet they had come in the spirit of war and hostility.  Nicolas had heard several different versions of just how their contact with Earth had broken down into war, but in the end, it hardly mattered.  It only took one side to fight a war and if the aliens had truly wanted peace, they could have easily have avoided fighting at all.  It wasn't as if the human race could take the war to them.  NASA had never produced anything worthwhile since the Space Shuttle.  If they’d concentrated on building spacecraft instead of pretty pictures, perhaps America wouldn’t have been occupied and the human race wouldn’t be under threat of extinction.  

His radio buzzed and he threw himself to the ground as the first missile fired.  The heavy handheld SAM launchers were an experimental design, built to tackle a new Russian helicopter design that was supposed to be even tougher than the Apache.  Only a handful had ever been produced, but he had four of them with his team, along with a number of more mundane Stinger antiaircraft missiles.  The alien craft had no time to evade and took all nine missiles directly in the drive field.  It heeled over like a drunken man trying to walk, before it crashed into the ground directly behind him.  The shock knocked him to the ground, but by some dark miracle, the alien craft didn’t explode.  He felt dazed, but somehow he picked himself off the ground and kept running anyway.  The alien ground troops would have something else to worry about.  If he was really lucky, they might even have been squashed under the crashed ship.

“Move,” he ordered, keying his radio one final time.  “Everyone out!”

***
The rendezvous warehouse looked like just any other warehouse.  It was large, musty, and seemingly disused.  The handful of rescued POWs – the others had been apparently escorted to other safe houses and meeting points - looked around nervously.  They hadn’t expected a warehouse to serve as a meeting point, although in hindsight it should have been obvious.  The warehouse was larger than a supermarket and provided more than enough room for the soldiers and their equipment.  The wounded from their desperate flight had been treated by a pair of combat medics and now they were waiting.  Michael wanted to leave, to go find his family, but the resistance fighters had warned them to stay down.  The aliens would be hunting for them.

“If I could have your attention, please,” a voice said.  Michael looked around to see a man standing on a large shipping box, staring down at him.  He was Special Forces, unless Michael was much mistaken, and reminded him of a SEAL he’d met while on deployment.  “We’re the local resistance and we liberated you from your former home.”

There were some chuckles.  “Our friends back there are pissed, but there’s no sign that they know where we are,” the speaker continued.  “We think that a handful of us – or you – got picked up or killed in the chase, yet most of the former prisoners got away.  I won’t go into details – what you don’t know you can’t tell – but we gave the bastards a black eye today.  They’re going to be hunting for all of you and they have your details now.  My guess is that they or their quislings will expand their control and eventually put the entire country into lockdown.  They may find you and take you back to the POW camp, or simply kill you out of hand.  I know that none of you expected to fight a war in your own backyard, but like it or not, that’s the situation we are all faced with.  You have a choice to make.

“You can try to make your way back to your homes and your families, or you can join us in our war.  I won’t take anyone with me who doesn’t want to fight.  I don’t have the manpower to enforce proper discipline any longer.  If you want to go home, you may leave.  If you want to stay and fight, you are welcome to join us.  We’ll parcel you out to resistance movements in the surrounding area, give you weapons and equipment, and you can give the bastards more than they bargained for.  The choice is yours.”

His voice softened slightly.  “You know the dangers,” he added.  “Your families may suffer for your decision.  You may never see your loved ones again.  You may wind up dead or worse.  Rumour has it that the aliens have ways to turn you into a quisling against your will.  I won’t think any less of anyone who decides not to carry on the fight.  We’ll try and help those who want to go home before hitting the enemy again, and again, and again, until they are out of our country or we’re all dead.  Resistance is not futile.”

Michael laughed.  “Sir,” he said, “I’m embarrassed that you even need to ask.”

There were some chuckles and the dim mood was broken.  “Think about it,” the SEAL said.  “Make your own decision and then let us know.  One way or another, we cannot stay here very long.  The aliens may come knocking at any moment.”

The discussion was very brief.  The vast majority of liberated prisoners chose to join the resistance and carry on the fight.  A handful of men, mainly with new families or relatives who needed them, insisted on returning home, if they could.  There was no way to slip someone into the cities.  It wasn't a complete loss, Michael was assured; the men who went back home could – and would – help in organising less official resistance.  Besides, the Army and Marines had been volunteer-only for a reason.  The last thing anyone needed was a resentful conscript behind them.

He’d thought about it himself.  Linking up with the survivors from Quantico had its attractions, quite apart from the chance to hit back at the aliens.  He felt as if he had failed badly when he’d been captured and held in the camp, even though cold logic told him that there had been no choice.  He felt as if he needed a chance to redeem himself, even at the cost of his own life.  The resistance offered the best chance of hurting the aliens.  Besides, if the aliens kept an eye on his family in hopes he’d show up and be arrested, he didn’t want to make it that easy for them.  If they decided to punish his family…

No, they wouldn’t do that, he told himself.  Besides, his father had been a Marine himself and would have told him to get back to work and keep fighting, whatever the cost.  He wouldn’t have thanked his son for walking away from the battlefield, especially if it was in his own home country.  He made his decision and relaxed.  Now he could go back to war.

“We decided,” Michael said, once the men who insisted on returning home had been escorted out.  “What now?”

“Now we start moving you all into units that can use you,” the SEAL said.  He gave him a wink.  “The bastards aren’t going to know what hit them.”
Chapter Seven

Washington DC, USA (Occupied)
Day 101

General Howery had joined the Dead Men Walking.

Or, at least, that was how Karen thought of them.  There were only about a dozen in Washington, but they seemed to dominate human-alien interactions.  They might have started out human, yet they all went through some kind of process at the hands of the aliens and ended up almost inhuman.  They seemed normal enough, most of the time, but their eyes were dead and they were supremely loyal to the aliens.  General Howery’s record spoke of a loyal soldier and American, yet now he was working openly for the aliens, without even a twinge of conscience to rebuke him at night.  Or perhaps he was screaming inside.  There were moments when she thought she saw the real man under the cold face, a man trapped in his own body.

She’d tried to warn him to agree to whatever they wanted, in hopes it would prevent him from being converted into a slave.  The thought of an ally in such a high place would have been welcome, yet he’d refused Daisy’s offer and had been mentally conditioned by the aliens.  Perhaps they would have conditioned him anyway.  They would hardly have let the person charged with raising and commanding battalions of humans operate unsupervised.  General Howery was theirs now, body and soul, and if she dared breath a word against them to him, she’d find herself picked up and probably converted as well.  And then she’d know just what it felt like to be dead and yet alive.

The process didn’t always seem to work perfectly.  She would have expected the puppet President to have been displayed to the public on every occasion, but instead Jacob Thornton only made brief appearances, explained away under the guise of security.  She’d only seen him a few times, but he looked worse than the other Walking Dead, as if he was on the verge of coming apart at the seams.  It was possible that the process had permanently damaged his mind and the aliens were trying to conceal it, or perhaps he had been trying to resist and they wanted to enhance their control as much as possible.  It wasn't as if the converted were simply parroting the aliens and echoing their commands.  They were thinking and working as if they were willing collaborators.  Only their eyes betrayed the truth – their eyes, and other tells.  Karen had taken a risk and flashed her breasts at one of them.  He hadn’t even batted an eyelid…and he had been a politician renowned for his womanising.  Under other circumstances, Karen would have found that funny.  It had taken alien mind control to convince him to stop thinking of women.

She gazed over at Daisy, seated at the table, and kept her face carefully blank.  The aliens might not be able to read faces, but their loyal slaves sure as hell could…and wouldn’t hesitate to bring their concerns to their new masters if they felt that there was a reason to be concerned.  Daisy wasn't one of the Walking Dead.  As far as Karen could tell, she and hundreds of other prominent people served the aliens willingly, placing themselves completely at their service.  Karen didn’t understand why some people willingly betrayed so much – not just their country, but their entire race – yet it hardly mattered.  Daisy’s willing service to the aliens was just another priceless piece of intelligence, if she could get it into the right hands.  The problem was that she had no idea how to contact anyone who might be interested.

The alien was speaking and the humans were listening with rapt attention.  “The escape of hundreds of human soldiers is unacceptable,” he said.  The aliens seemed at times to pay no attention to their humans, at other times; they exercised very close supervision indeed.  There seemed to be no logic to their decisions.  “They are to be recaptured as quickly as possible.”

“Of course, sir,” General Howery said.  The hell of it was that Karen knew that he really meant every word.  He had no choice, but to mean it.  “We need to build up the manpower to track them all down unless you intend to devote more warriors to the task.”

Karen studied the alien leader with interest.  The warriors had been concentrated around the cities, keeping them in lockdown, and the mass alien landings in the more under-populated areas of America.  A number had been deployed to captured military bases and suchlike, but they hadn’t been pushed much further away from the remainder of the aliens.  She suspected that the aliens were much more inclined to conserve their resources than they implied, which suggested…how many of the one billion aliens were actually warriors?  How many of them could fight?  She looked over at the smaller workers fussing over their superior and frowned.  Could they fight in a pinch?  They looked so weak and puny, as if a single glancing blow would crush their skulls, yet it might have been an illusion.  She’d seen one of them carrying a massive load through the secure zone housing the collaborators.

“Warriors are to be reserved for securing the population centres,” Ethos said, finally.  The alien voice showed no hint of emotion, no frustration or even amusement.  It was hard to tell what the creature was really feeling.  “You will deploy human units to secure the area.”

“They are not ready,” General Howery said, slowly.  Karen wondered just how strong the temptation had been to just do what the alien said.  It was another worrying aspect to their conditioning.  The Walking Dead weren't just obeying the aliens, they were offering their knowledge and experience to their new masters as well.  She had no idea what the aliens had done to change their minds – quite literally – but it was powerful, and evil.  “We may have a few thousand volunteers in Washington alone, but they are barely marching in step.  They will be easy targets for the resistance if we send them out without heavy escort.  They need more time to train.”

Karen nodded inwardly.  The resistance might not have launched any mass attacks, apart from the attacks aimed at liberating thousands of prisoners from camps across the nation, but they maintained a constant steady pressure on the occupation forces.  Warriors had been sniped at, or targeted with IEDs, or even lured into ambushes and kill zones.  The resistance hadn’t scored any big successes inside the cities, yet there were a handful of smaller victories that were costing the aliens, even if they were pinpricks compared to the sheer immensity of alien power.  The crashed ship in Washington – no one could miss seeing it, even if the aliens had cordoned it off and refused to allow anyone near – was a permanent reminder that the aliens were not all-powerful.  Outside the cities, the story was different.  Human collaborators were shot at and killed, while alien patrols found themselves under brief attacks and discovered that their attackers faded away once they mounted counterattacks.  Alien transports had been targeted by handheld SAM missiles, although none had been taken down apart from ground-attack craft.  The whole situation was slowly spinning out of control.

She remembered President Chalk’s declaration just before the Fall of Washington, removing all limits on the possession of weapons and repealing all of the gun control laws.  There had been a rush on gun stores and literally millions of weapons had been distributed across the nation, in preparation for – she saw now – a ground occupation.  The aliens might well have bitten off more than they could chew.  Or perhaps it wouldn’t matter in the long run.  Iraq had had a nasty insurgency too, fuelled by foreign cash and fighters – and a few bad decisions made by the occupation authorities – and in the end, the United States had won.  Iraq had had a few good years as a democratic state before the aliens had invaded.  The insurgency had only prolonged the agony.  Would the United States go the same way?

“We’ve been working on building up the governmental systems that were…ah disrupted during the invasion,” Daisy said, into the silence.  “The vast majority of bureaucrats are just men and women trying to earn a living and without them, running the country would have been impossible.  We caught thousands of them in Washington alone and have been putting them back to work, along with more…reasonable administrations in states and cities.  In a few months, we should have a much greater level of control over the country and we can use it to put pressure on the insurgency from that direction.  The expanded police force can be used to underline that control.”

Karen felt sick.  She’d realised that Daisy was ambitious when they’d first met properly, just after the alien mothership had been detected, but she hadn’t realised just how ambitious.  The aliens had offered her power and she’d accepted, creating the beginnings of a network they’d use – one day – to control the country.  Karen could see how it would work, just as it had at SETI.  There would be ID Cards, a vastly-expanded police force and firm controls.  Anything not permitted would be forbidden.  She wondered how long it would be before they started ordering all guns to be handed in, on pain of death, or worse.  A little pressure in the right places and the resistance might be broken.  Or, what if the aliens managed to work out the bugs in their conversion process?  They wouldn’t have to wait for a Judas to come forward – they’d just make one for themselves.  The Nazis and the Soviet Union had maintained control without such methods.  What could the aliens do if they had them at hand?

“The small handful of people with real military experience who have volunteered to join the Order Police are untrustworthy,” Howery was saying.  Karen realised that her mind had drifted away from the subject at hand.  “Some of them, according to their records, were discharged or were regarded as unsuitable for promotion.  The ones with good military records may intend to subvert the police from inside.  I would advise against forming a specialist unit from them and deploying them without heavy supervision.”

“We did not expect success within the day,” Ethos informed him.  Karen privately considered that a good thing.  Howery was looking at the alien as if he was a love-struck child.  He would have killed himself if the alien had ordered him to die.  “We are patient.  The insurgency will not threaten our operations on this planet.”

Karen hoped that he was wrong.  It was hard to get reliable news, even for collaborators, but she’d been able to pick up some outside news from the BBC, which had rapidly transformed itself into an internet media giant.  The aliens were dealing with another insurgency in North Africa and the Middle East, one that was both more violent and less effective than the one facing them in America.  She hoped that the aliens regarded it as a more serious threat and deployed their forces to match, but somehow she doubted it.  Daisy had made it clear that one thing the aliens did want was America’s vast industrial complexes.  All the Middle East had was oil.

“On to other matters,” Daisy said, as if she had heard Karen’s thoughts.  “We have secured and repaired most of the damaged utilities systems in the country.  The people are no longer in darkness in the cities, nor do they have to worry about water and sanitation.  The absence of electricity was certainly fuelling the insurgency and the return to normal life across much of the country will probably help to dampen it.  The closure of all of the nuclear power plants has been announced and we expect that it will encourage the acceptance of the new order.  Fusion is much cleaner – and free.

“The workers at the various industrial production complexes have largely returned to work,” she continued.  “The Dollar may have fallen in value to almost nothing, but we have been able to offer food and security for their families, as well as other benefits.  The process of reshaping the economy to replace the loss of China and other countries as a source of raw material is moving slowly, but we estimate that we will be at eighty percent of pre-war production levels within six months.  We should be able to meet your requirements without major trouble.”

Karen listened with interest, her face betraying nothing of her thoughts.  The aliens wanted human factories producing items for them, but what?  Their technology was so advanced that it was hard to believe that humans were actually better at something than them, but perhaps…or perhaps they didn’t want to waste time building their own factories when they could use inferior human products.  Or perhaps…they might just be doing it for their own inscrutable reasons.

“And the insurgency?”  Ethos asked.  “Will they not attempt to disrupt production?”

“They will discover that attacking the factories and the workers there will make them very unpopular among people who depend on them for a living,” Daisy assured him.  Karen heard the self-satisfaction in her tone and felt sick.  “They could only do us a favour by attacking humans who are just trying to survive.”

Howery shrugged.  “Can the workers be trusted to behave?”

“The lives of their families depend on the factories,” Daisy said.  “I believe that they will cooperate.  It is in their interests to cooperate.”

On that note, the meeting ended.

Karen had taken to wandering around Washington outside the secure zone, even though it wasn't particularly safe.  The insurgency in Washington had never really gotten off the ground – there were thousands of Warriors swarming around the city, ready and waiting for someone to start something – but there were plenty of desperate men and women out there.  It was one of the reasons why the aliens had had so many volunteers for the Order Police.  The Warriors might keep down real trouble, but looting, rape and murder was on the rise.  The aliens couldn’t be everywhere.  This time, however, she had a more specific destination in mind.

The internet café had survived, somehow, when many other buildings had been destroyed during the war.  The owner had managed to keep up the links and remain online, even though the worst of the fighting.  Now that the telephone lines and cell phones were down, the internet had rapidly become the main communications system in America.  Karen had thought about using one of the computers in the secure zone, but it would have been easy for someone to load a monitoring program onto the computers there that would have tipped off the aliens.  The internet café had risks of its own, yet it wouldn’t be so easy for them to identify her if they picked up the message.  She pushed open the door and stepped inside, her stomach growling at the scent of hot coffee and cookies.   The dollar might have been worthless, but there was always something to trade.

“So,” the owner said.  He was a fat man wearing a shirt that was at least two sizes too small.  A shotgun sat prominently on the table, a warning to any would-be looters.  Karen was surprised that the aliens hadn’t confiscated it.  “What do you have and what can I get for you?”

There were girls in Washington who were supporting themselves through prostitution, but Karen had other options.  “This,” she said, holding up a small can of coffee grains.  Without supplies coming in from outside the city, coffee had suddenly become rarer than gold.  “And there’s more where that came from.”

The owner’s eyes narrowed.  “Where did you get that?”

“My boyfriend used to love going on camping holidays,” Karen lied.  Actually, she’d liberated it from one of the hotel suites.  “He had a stockpile of things like this.  I want a month’s free and secure internet time for this.”

“Two weeks,” the owner said.  Karen blinked.  The coffee shortage must be worse than she had thought.  The thought of depriving Americans of their coffee…the aliens didn’t have the slightest idea what they’d done.  “I don’t know about secure though, these days…”

“It’ll do,” Karen said.  The government had started to monitor the internet much more closely after 9/11, leading some hackers to develop software intended to keep prying eyes away, just on principle.  A number of court cases had been underway when the aliens landed and put a stop to them.  “And privacy.”

“Over there,” the owner said, pointing to a small cubicle.  “Keep your head down.”

Karen stepped into the cubicle and shook the computer’s mouse, waking it up.  The internet had always given the impression of security, but she knew better than to take that for granted, not when the aliens might be watching over her shoulder.  It made a chilling kind of sense – they could have left the café alone to see who used it – and it wasn't the only danger.  The owner might keep an eye on her himself.  She logged on and checked how many email servers were still working.  Most of them, she discovered to her surprise, were still online.  Only a handful of sites were missing.  It was the work of a few moments to create a completely new email account and verify it.  It wouldn’t do for purchasing anything online, but it would suffice for sending messages.

She took a breath.  She could still back out, yet she couldn’t.  The President had given her his personal calling card when they’d met, a simple card – like any other business card – with his private contact details.  She’d been told that she had to keep it completely to herself.  The emails went directly to the President with no one else in the loop.  It was a risk – she had no way of knowing if the President was in any position to pick up the email – yet how else could she get a message out?  No one, not even a collaborator, was allowed to leave the city without a very good reason.

The USB stick felt hot in her hand as she inserted it into the computer.  The compressed file inside held copies of plenty of Daisy’s files, although she hadn’t been able to copy everything.  She attached it to an email – signed it, with a wry smile, Deep Throat – and pushed SEND.  There was a moment’s pause, and then the file vanished into the internet.  Karen relaxed slightly, struggling to control her heartbeat, and then started to systematically wipe all the evidence of what she’d done.  One way or another, the die was cast.  She just hoped that someone, somewhere, could make use of what she’d done.
Chapter Eight

Area 53, Nevada, USA
Day 110

“Now that’s not something anyone wants to see,” Doctor Jane Hatchery said, dryly.  “Get it off the screen before I puke.”

Alex Midgard gave her a droll smile.  “There’s nothing good on the television these days,” he said, matching her tone.  The image of an alien warrior was unpleasant, but it looked better than many of the people he’d seen on television since the Fall of Washington.  “We have to look at the aliens sometime.”

Jane shrugged.  “I’d prefer not to look at them at all,” she said.  “I did the research, I did the first dissection of an alien life form…and I still can’t believe that that ugly bastard” – she nodded towards the screen – “is related to the being we have downstairs.”

Alex said nothing.  The human race had captured precisely one alien alive, an alien whose suicide implant had somehow failed to detonate and liquefy his brain.  If the aliens knew – or cared – that one of their number was held within a secret American military base, they’d showed no sign of concern.  They probably assumed that their prisoner was dead, Alex had concluded long ago; if they’d known that the human race had a prisoner, they would have done everything they could to locate and recover him before the humans could make him talk.

The security of the base was a recurring concern.  Area 53 – and Area 52, the home of the crashed alien ship that had alerted the human race to its new enemy – had been secret even before the aliens had arrived, so secret that most of the files concerning their existence had been wiped long ago.  No alien ships had descended on either of the bases to offload warriors to occupy them – as the aliens had occupied more well-known bases – but Alex privately suspected that it was only a matter of time.  The aliens had clearly captured some files from Washington and any one of them might have a reference that would lead them to Area 53 – and the captive alien.  He’d been told that there were hundreds of other such bases, hidden away in unpopulated areas and concealed even from the locals, but the aliens had clearly stumbled across at least one of them.  They’d broken into the Vice President’s bunker and captured him…and no one knew how they’d located him.  No one had even known that he’d been captured until he started making speeches to the nation.  

And there was another concern.  Area 53 had been originally intended as a research site for biological warfare and had been sited well away from innocent civilian populations.  The aliens had started to settle parts of Flyover Country from orbit – driving away or capturing the humans living in the rural areas – and their expansion might eventually lead them over Area 53, even without knowing what they’d taken.  If it was entirely up to him, he would have moved the captive out of the country completely, but that would be tricky.  The slightest hint that something wasn't quite right would bring the aliens down on their heads and that would be the end.

He looked up at the image of the alien warrior and smiled.  “We put all of these images through facial recognition software,” he said.  He’d studied such software during his time at the Foreign Technology Division, when the world had made sense and he wasn't a fugitive hiding in a Cold War era bunker.  The software had never been as capable as its proponents and detractors had claimed, yet it did sometimes lead to interesting results.  “They found that the alien warriors fell into two general categories.”

The images sharpened, revealing two different warrior faces.  One had a slightly sharper chin and more focused eyes than the other.  “There’s no way to know for sure, but the analysts think that they might be male and female, rather than differences caused by being different racial subsets or castes,” he said.  “It could be that we’ve been looking in the wrong place for alien females.  They might have been right under our noses all the time.”

“The alien we have here and the dead aliens back at Area 52 are definitely male,” Jane said, flatly.  “Unless their reproduction is radically different from ours, perhaps like fish or lizards, they have to have an internal womb and other human-like attributes.  We really need an alien female to dissect.”

“We’ll try and get you one,” Alex promised, knowing that it was a promise he might not be able to keep.  The aliens killed since the Fall of Washington had all been killed in brief encounters, not battles where alien bodies might be recovered.  The resistance had considered sneaking back to try to recover alien bodies hours after the fighting, but it had rapidly become clear that the aliens removed their bodies and took them back to their bases.  “Have you made any more progress with our friend?”

Jane scowled angrily.  The alien held in the secure bio containment lab certainly understood English, but seemed completely unable to speak it, although when pressed he – if it was a he – had made noises in the alien language.  It was a weird atonal language composed of everything from whines to clicks and hisses, utterly beyond the ability of the human mouth to reproduce.  It was clear that some aliens could speak English – and presumably other human languages as well – yet it apparently wasn't an ability they all shared.  The reports from the resistance units operating in the towns and cities confirmed that some of the warriors spoke English, but not all of them.

Or perhaps they all speak English and are playing dumb to lure us into making mistakes, he cautioned himself.  The aliens were alien.  They might think that it made perfect sense to abandon a missing comrade and refuse to speak to the humans in their own language.  No one knew anything about how their culture and society were ordered, or just how the different castes interacted.  Every time he thought that he understood it, a new piece of data would come along and force him to re-evaluate his theories.  Understanding other cultures had never been an interest of his…

And there were plenty of differences between human cultures, let alone humans and aliens.  America had a very different culture to Russia, and they were both practically identical compared to China, or the Middle East.  In the Middle East – at least, before the alien invasion – Jane would have been married off by now and have at least three kids, and she would have been very lucky if she was allowed to study medicine.  Alex had never believed in cultural relativism – the belief that all cultures had the same inherent right to exist – and it was clear that the aliens shared his lack of concern.  They thought nothing of reshaping America – and the rest of the world – to suit their own motives.  For all he knew, the Leaders ran their society and considered the remaining castes expandable.

“Jenny and Marilyn are working on him now,” Jane said.  “They’ve been trying to teach the alien sign language and he seems to be picking up on it fairly quickly.  I suppose it helps if he wants to convince us to feed him better, or stop hurting him…”

Alex blinked.  “We’re not hurting him, are we?”

“Would we know if we were?”  Jane countered.  “For all we know, the food we’re giving him is basically slop and gruel, like the stuff they give the people under their direct control.”

“I see,” Alex said.  The foodstuffs recovered from crashed alien ships had run out after a few days, forcing the alien to try human food, or starve.  It seemed that the alien preferred bland human food to anything flavoured, although it was impossible to say for sure.  Eggs had caused the alien to vomit everything over the table and spend the next two days shivering.  It might have made an interesting biological weapon, Alex had thought at the time, but there was no way to test it.  He’d suggested that the resistance try to find a way to get eggs into the alien diet, yet no one had been able to come up with a way of doing so.  Besides, it might provoke savage reprisals against the human communities.  “But we’re letting him chose his own food.”

That was a sore spot among the handful of humans who knew that there was a captured alien on the base.  Food at Area 53 was never very good at the best of times – the base had only been reactivated two months ago – and what stores there were had to be conserved carefully.  A fully-manned military base could go through an awesome amount of food in a very short space of time, rations or no rations, and the thought that the alien might be living large while others felt as they were on the verge of starvation was a cause of distress.  Master Sergeant George Grosskopf, the commander of the Base Security Team – and the one who’d captured the alien in the first place – had reported having to speak quite sharply to several soldiers who complained about the alien diet.  A handful had been released to join the resistance in other parts of the state – Las Vegas was apparently proving a handful for the aliens – but the remainder had no choice, but to stay.  They knew too much.

“In theory, our food should be safe for them to eat,” Jane said.  They both knew that that wasn't a good thing.  “In practice…it’s possible that he’s missing out on essential nutrients and other vital elements of his diet.  It’s not as if we understand everything about them, is it?”

“No,” Alex said.  He clicked off the images of the alien warriors and poured himself a cup of coffee.  It might have been his imagination, but he could have sworn that it was weaker than he normally preferred.  The base’s coffee supplies were under armed guard.  “I wonder if they know as much as they think they know about us.”

He clicked the remote control and switched the screen to the local channel.  CNN, FOX and WNN had vanished along with the satellites, leaving a void, until the aliens had started to fill it with their own propaganda.  The collaborators on the screen spoke about the joys that alien rule would bring to the planet, with long sections on how alien technology had healed the sick, reformed the criminal and removed the blight of nuclear power from the land.  It didn’t seem to occur to them that fusion power stations were nuclear as well, or that the aliens could tighten their grip through controlling the power supply…or perhaps it had occurred to them.  Alex found it hard to understand how someone would willingly sell themselves to the aliens and work for them, but perhaps the collaborators were desperate, or wanted power.  There was no way to know what their motives were, yet at least they weren’t among the Walking Dead.  They had chosen to serve the aliens willingly.

“In other news, the Order Police has started to deploy over a million fully-trained police officers to bring order back to the streets,” the collaborator on the screen said.  She had a bra size, he decided, that was larger than her IQ.  Her breasts kept threatening to burst out of her shirt and flop about on the screen.  There were people in the Bible Belt who would faint if they saw her.  “They will ensure that terrorists and insurgents are driven away from innocent people and eventually wiped out.”

Alex considered her words, automatically dismissing the claim that they had over a million policemen.  If they had that many to deploy, in addition to alien forces, the war was within shooting distance of being lost.  The more interesting point was the losses among innocents caught up in the fighting.  The official resistance had tried hard to avoid killing civilians, yet there were plenty of unofficial groups out there and the collaborators had made much of their atrocities.  The images of bloodstained bodies and dead children had been splashed across the world’s screens…all blamed, of course, on the insurgents.

Santini had pointed out, in a fit of rage, that back when he’d been in Iraq, all the innocent civilian deaths had been blamed on the Americans.  Never mind that the insurgents had a habit of using civilians as human shields.  Never mind that some of the nastier groups had intended to kill as many innocents as possible to trigger a civil war.  Never mind that American soldiers did everything they could to keep down civilian casualties…the media had licked up the shit they’d been fed by the insurgents and come back for more.  It hadn’t surprised him in the slightest and he’d been more than happy to expound upon his theory at length.

“We used to joke about fragging reporters in the sandbox, but none of us ever did,” he’d said.  “The reporters knew we’d never kill them even if they blew an operation wide open.  The insurgents, on the other hand, considered any reporter who spoke against them a legitimate target, so the reporters stopped trying to speak against them and effectively supported them instead.  Terror works.  But then, most reporters are really good at rationalising it so they don’t sound like fucking cowards.”

“That girl should be on the target list,” Alex said, finally.  The resistance websites included lists of collaborators and encouragement for anyone who wanted to assassinate one or more of them.  The collaborators had started moving their people into secure areas to evade assassins.  “Do you want to place bets on when she dies?”

“Doctors shouldn’t bet on a person’s death,” Jane said, tartly.  “I wonder if…”

She broke off as her pager buzzed.  “There’s something happening with the alien,” she said.  “Coming?”

Alex followed her though the base’s winding corridors into the bio-containment area.  Extensive tests had confirmed that there was no biohazard from the aliens – the aliens themselves had confirmed it as well, although they’d lied so often that people were wary about taking them at their word – but the base commander had insisted on keeping the levels sealed, just in case.  Alex suspected that he had visions of the alien somehow breaking out of his confinement and making his way to the surface and escaping, but that was absurd.  Comic book aliens were one thing – Superman had gained superpowers under Earth’s yellow sun – but real aliens were just…mortals.  The aliens had a grasp of technology that exceeded mankind’s, they could do things that humans could not, yet they were not gods.  They could be outthought.  They could be beaten.

Jenny met them at the door and waved them in.  She looked rather like a head cheerleader in High School, but she’d actually come directly from the NSA as a language expert.  She’d been born into an Ambassador’s family and at seven years old, according to her file, she’d been able to speak five different languages.  She’d added a new one every two years, improving and expanding her fluency well beyond even specialists in a single language.  The NSA had recognised her talents and hired her as a language expert, training her until she could pick up the gist of a language with terrifying speed.  Marilyn had been added as an afterthought, but Alex had been impressed when he realised that someone had had a brainstorm.  There were humans who couldn’t speak, for various reasons, and they learned sign language.  Why couldn’t the aliens do the same?

“I’ve actually made progress on deciphering their spoken language,” Jenny explained, as they stepped into the outer room.  The alien was held in a surprisingly luxurious apartment, although it was clearly also a bio-lab.  It was a place where the illusion of freedom and privacy could be maintained, if need be for years.  “I can’t speak more than a handful of words and I suspect that no human will ever be able to do so without massive computer support or surgical alteration, but I’m getting there.  I’m building up a dictionary and…”

“Leave out the specifics,” Alex said.  “What about the alien?”

Jenny waved a hand towards the inner room.  Alex followed her gaze.  The alien – they still didn’t have a name for the being – sat on one chair, making complicated gestures towards Marilyn, who replied in kind.  Alex had seen some gestures used to pass messages between troops when it was dangerous to speak aloud, yet sign language was far more complicated – and expressive.  It was easy to believe that they were sharing vast amounts of information.

“I think they finally made a breakthrough of their own,” Jenny confirmed.  The alien nodded up, made a slow nodding motion with his great head, and returned to signalling Marilyn.  “They’ve been doing that for nearly an hour.”

Alex watched, impressed.  The problem of communicating with an alien life form had been researched long before real aliens arrived, yet theory had suggested that it would be almost impossible.  If an alien was truly alien, they might have nothing in common with humanity and no ability to build up a proper shared understanding.  The attempts to teach dolphins or chimpanzees to speak had all failed.  And yet…the aliens clearly had as much interest in learning to speak to humanity as humanity had in learning to speak to them.  It wasn't as if they wanted to remain silent.

“Good,” he said, finally.  “What have they learned?”

“Quite a bit,” Jenny said.  She picked up a sheaf of handwritten notes.  “We might finally have an idea about how their society fits together.”

“Good,” Alex said.  He took the first sheet of paper and skimmed through it rapidly.  “I think we’re going to need that information.”

“I’ll have a full briefing for you later,” Jenny assured him.  “I just haven’t wanted to disturb those two.  Aren’t they sweet together?”

Alex didn’t bother to reply.
Chapter Nine

RAF Machrihanish, United Kingdom
Day 111

“Welcome to Torchwood, Prime Minister.”

Prime Minister Arthur Hamilton scowled at what he considered inappropriate humour.  RAF Machrihanish was located a long way from London and coming out without being noticed, even with the massive security clampdown, hadn’t been easy.  Jokes about Torchwood and other fictional secret agencies intended to track alien life sounded hollow when faced with the reality.  Britain hadn’t been invaded, or even threatened with invasion, yet the country was on the verge of breaking apart.  Two days ago, he’d signed an order placing elements of 16 Air Assault Brigade in Bradford, with orders to prevent rioting with lethal force.  No Prime Minister had issued such orders for over a hundred years.

RAF Machrihanish had an odd history, one that ensured that it was mentioned in numerous conspiracy theories.  The base had once been operated by the Americans, before being shared with a civilian operator, and rumours persisted about what might have happened in secret bunkers under the ground.  The base had been repossessed completely by the MOD in the wake of the global economic collapse and transformed into a top secret research station, studying alien technology in the hope of developing weapons that could be used to defend Britain, if not liberate the world.  The work had to remain a secret.  The aliens had punched out NORAD just before the Fall of Washington and RAF Machrihanish’s defences were flimsy in comparison.

“Thank you,” he said, shaking General Williamson’s hand.  The General had seen combat service in Afghanistan, where he’d commanded one of the Forward Operating Bases.  He was known as a safe pair of hands for a secret project well away from political oversight.  “I understand that you’ve finally gotten the base up and running.”

Williamson didn’t beat around the bush.  “Yes, Prime Minister,” he said.  “Torchwood – I’m afraid the name has stuck – is beginning research into two of the three alien craft now.  The third has been moved to a secure location where it will be studied by a different team, just in case this base is compromised by the aliens or the press.  The American researchers have been a great help, although they did have some access to the craft that crashed in America.  The remainder of the researchers are still getting up to speed.”

He waved a hand at the other two people in the hangar.  “Doctor Syeda Bihide, Chief Scientist, and Tony Jones, on special assignment from the President of America,” he said, introducing them.  The Prime Minister shook their hands in turn.  Syeda was a short dark-skinned woman with bright brown eyes; Tony Jones was older, with the first traces of grey hair at his temples.  If he had been assigned to the UK by President Chalk, he would be extremely competent and loyal.  The President was not known for tolerating fools or people who were willing to subvert American policy for their own interests.  “We have prepared a short tour of the base for you so that we can introduce you to the departmental heads.  If you’ll come with me…?”

The Prime Minister followed him deeper into the hangar, passing a black aircraft that remained half-hidden inside the hangar, and into the elevator.  RAF Machrihanish might not have looked like much from high above – although it had the longest runway in the UK – but the complex underground was much more impressive.  There were secret hangars, training bunkers and even a complete biological research lab, all top secret.  Rumours had been leaking out for years, hence the decision to close down most of the activities at the base following the end of the Cold War, yet few researchers had guessed the truth.  RAF Machrihanish had once been Britain’s Area 51.

“I understand that there have been some issues with security,” he said, as the elevator doors hissed closed and the small chamber began to descend.  “What’s your current situation look like?”

The General paused to gather his thoughts.  “We’ve attracted some interest from the local community, Prime Minister,” he said.  “They knew that the civilian airfield had been shut down and they’ve believed for years that we had more here than we ever publicly admitted to having.  We’ve been quietly encouraging the local police to move on tourists and have involved D-Notices and other such laws to discourage the media from picking up on the interest, even to the point of interfering with internet access.  I don’t believe that any of it presents a serious threat, but we will keep an eye on it and prepare for the worst.

“About the aliens…we have soldiers here with handheld SAM missiles and other weapons, but if they decide they want to come and take the base, we’re screwed,” he added.  “We couldn’t deploy Patriot or Rapier missile launchers to Machrihanish without drawing their attention and warning them that we had something here we considered worth defending.  This base doesn’t have a fighter CAP or any additional defences, although the bunkers should provide some protection if we are attacked.  We’ve been very careful about what we do here to avoid attracting their attention.”

The Prime Minister nodded bitterly.  The disastrous Blair and Brown Governments were long over, but their legacy remained in almost every field.  They’d encouraged the development of the Eurofighter and other advanced weapons systems, while cutting costs elsewhere in a desperate attempt to balance the budget.  Iraq and Afghanistan had taught politicians the folly of that decision and money had been – eventually – redirected to the British Army and its supporting elements, rather than the RAF or ground-based SHORAD units.  The irony was chilling.  The defenders of Britain didn’t have enough weapons and equipment to cover even the most vital sectors.  Machrihanish might be the most vital sector of all, yet they didn’t even dare defend the base for fear of alerting the aliens.

“I understand,” he said, as the lift came to a halt.  “And the scientists?”

“The Yanks are settling in reasonably well, although many of them miss their families,” Williamson confirmed.  The American Government, in the final days of the war, had launched a program to get as many first-class scientists and researchers out of the country as possible, but in all the confusion not all of them had escaped with their families.  There was little hope of convincing the aliens to allow their families to leave America, if they even wanted to go.  “The Resistance movement in America will try to rescue as many as possible, but it won’t be easy to smuggle them out.  Transatlantic shipping has fallen to a new low.  What little there is coming out isn’t always that useful.”

He didn’t go into details and the Prime Minister didn’t press him.  “There’s also the political issue,” Syeda said, speaking for the first time.  Her voice held a strong flavour of Lancashire, suggesting that she’d been born and bred there.  “Many of the vetted and cleared scientists we brought here from the mainland have been angry at their American counterparts for not sharing the details of the crashed ship earlier.  There have been some discussions that have developed into fights.  There’s a limit to how many people we can bring to this base and they…well, pretty much every scientist on this base knows someone who would be really helpful, if only they could be vetted and cleared.”

“The decision to maintain secrecy was made by the President,” Jones said.  He sounded tired and defeated, as if he’d already given up all hope.  It couldn’t be easy, the Prime Minister realized, to know that one’s homeland was lost, perhaps permanently.  “None of the scientists on this base knew about the crashed ship until it was revealed to the world by the aliens.”

“Leave it for the moment,” the Prime Minister ordered.  They had come to a vast set of doors.  At a muttered command from Williamson, the doors started to swing open, revealing a single alien craft sitting within a framework holding it off the ground.  The Prime Minister studied it with interest.  He’d seen an alien craft before, when the aliens had visited Britain weeks ago, but a crashed ship was different.  Even the obvious damage to the craft’s rear didn’t detract from its eerie beauty.  It seemed to shimmer, taunting the humans with its silent perfection.  “My God.”

“I doubt that God had much to do with this ship,” Williamson said.  “This craft might be repairable if we knew how to repair it – it certainly seems to be more intact than the other two craft.  We have research teams concentrating on duplicating the American successes at Area 52 and hopefully expanding into whole new areas.  We may have had a breakthrough.”

The Prime Minister glanced over at him.  The General’s face looked odd in the reflected light from the alien craft.  “Something we can use against them?”

“I think so,” the General said.  “If you’ll come with me…?”

The General’s office was small and cramped.  The Prime Minister liked it at once, even though the chairs were uncomfortable and the poster on the wall – an image of a tall man wearing a trenchcoat, with a line asking WHO would save the human race – was frankly disturbing.  The General poured a generous glass of Scotch for the Prime Minister and Jones; Syeda had a small glass of water.  The Prime Minister had never been much of a drinker, yet he had to admit that the Scotch was top quality.  The General’s family owned a distillery up in Scotland.

“The aliens are not gods,” Williamson said, once they were all comfortable.  “They have more advanced technology, sure.  They can do things we can’t, yet their technology is based on principles we understand or can come to understand.  There’s no magic in what they do.”

“As others have pointed out,” the Prime Minister said.  “Can we deploy new hardware in time to prevent them from invading Britain?”

“Perhaps,” Williamson said.  “We may not be able to duplicate everything they do just yet, but we do have some ideas that were prompted by their technology.  They taught us how to produce, in effect, excellent batteries, which are really just systems to store energy.  Combined with some of our tech, we can actually discharge that energy in a single burst.”  He grinned.  “It would make one hell of a weapon.”

The Prime Minister considered it.  “Would it be effective against the alien craft?”

Syeda rubbed the back of her head.  “Yes and no, Prime Minister,” she said.  “The aliens deployed a plasma cannon-like weapon against the USAF.  It fired bolts of plasma that destroyed whatever they hit, yet they didn’t move at light speed and could be evaded by a skilled pilot.  Our new weapon would move at light speed.  By the time the aliens knew that they were under fire, they’d have been hit.”

“The downside is that we don’t know for sure just what effect the weapons would have,” Williamson added.  “The alien drive fields, we believe, absorb energy and only fail when too much energy is pumped in, overloading the field.  The craft we have here all have fused drive systems, although we are following up several promising theories and may be able to unlock the mystery of how to build them for ourselves.  We don’t know if we can hit them hard enough to knock out even one of their fighter craft – but they will certainly know that they’ve been fired upon.”

“It sounds more promising than anything else,” the Prime Minister said.  “How long would it be until you can produce a test version?”

Williamson looked uncomfortable.  “At least two months, Prime Minister,” he said.  “The…well, we used to draw a great deal of equipment and technology from the United States and that is no longer available to us.  Our own tech base is advanced, but the Americans were right at the cutting edge of the possible.  We might have to make the tools to make the tools to make the weapons and it could take years.  It would also have no rational purpose other than fighting the aliens.”

“Perhaps convincing them to hit us before we hit them,” the Prime Minister said.

“Precisely,” Williamson agreed.  “There’s also the issue of moving on to mass production.  That could take years.”

The Prime Minister winced.  Despite desperate efforts and a level of governmental control that would have been unthinkable before the invasion, the British economy was sliding down the slippery slope to disaster.  The loss of the United States had seriously damaged the economy and the knock-on effects had wiped out tens of thousands of jobs.  The rest of Europe was in the same condition, although some of them had it even worse.  The news out of France was growing darker every day.  Germany was staggering under the twin blows of economic collapse and racial unrest, while to the east Russia waited and bided her time.  China had collapsed into a sinkhole of civil war, fighting a savage multi-sided conflict…there would be no help from there.

“Give it the highest priority,” he ordered, harshly.  They’d have to produce the weapons.  There was no other choice.  “What else is there?”

He listened to a brief outline of the ongoing research program, but there was little else that was truly new.  The alien craft were still largely unexplored, although teams were digging into every aspect of the ships and distributing knowledge around the base.  The workings of the alien FTL system remained a mystery, although one theoretical physicist had produced an elegant theory explaining how the alien craft were able to move faster than light.  The alien plasma weapon had been extensively studied, but all of the teams had concluded that even if they duplicated the weapon, it would do them no good.  The alien craft had hit each other during the big air battles, without taking any damage at all.  Their drive fields had simply absorbed the hits.

“Thank you,” he said, finally.  There was one question that still nagged at him…and it was unlikely that he’d ever see President Chalk again.  “Mr Jones…why did the President insist on keeping the crashed UFO a secret?”

Jones looked down at the clean floor.  “There were several different reasons,” he said.  “We didn’t know what we were dealing with, so the President wanted to get a handle on it before we brought in the rest of the world.  We wanted to know just what the aliens were doing and how they’d slipped so close to secure airspace without being detected.  We thought…we thought that the rest of the world would declare war if they ever realised that we had the craft, or demand access to any research program.  It wasn't that foolish a concern.  An economic embargo would have crippled the global economy.”

“And you wanted the United States to have first crack at a faster-than-light drive system,” the Prime Minister said, without rancour.  He would have done the same thing if the situation were reversed.  “And yet, you kept information about a threat to the entire planet to yourself…”

Jones looked up at him.  “There’s a story I read once, while I was growing up,” he said.  “I forgot the title, but the story stuck with me afterwards.  There’s this planet that is in desperate need of medical supplies from Earth and so a spaceship was dispatched to carry the supplies to the colony.  The problem is that fuel is so expensive that every single ounce has to be finely calculated and there is no spare fuel.  A single gram of extra weight on a spacecraft would ensure disaster.”

His voice hardened.  “The fuel is so expensive that pirates try to hijack the ships frequently and that means that they have to kill the pilot, because otherwise there would be too much mass and the ship would crash.  The pilots can’t show any mercy to hijackers either – it’s kill or be killed – so when one pilot realises that there’s a stowaway on his ship, he heads off to kill him.  Except it’s a her, and she’s a young girl who wanted to visit her brother on the colony.  She’s an innocent.

“Don’t you see my point?  The girl didn’t know anything about the fuel, or the fact that her mere presence ensures that the craft will crash when it tries to land, dooming the colony.  The universe doesn’t care that she boarded the ship with innocent motives.  The cold equations apply to her as much as they do to the pilot, or the pirates, or everyone else.  She has to die for the sake of everyone else.  It doesn’t matter if the pilot kills her or if she walks out of the airlock.  She has to die!

“The President didn’t know about the mothership, or the aliens, or everything else we know now.  It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d told the entire world or not – a month afterwards, the mothership would have arrived at Earth anyway.  We wondered…one of the scenarios the analysts came up with was a suggestion that the aliens had meant us to discover the craft, in hopes of triggering off World War Three and removing any human threat.  We kept it to ourselves because we wanted to prevent global chaos.  If we’d known what was coming, perhaps we would have made a different call, but we made the best call we could with what we knew at the time.”

The Prime Minister nodded slowly.  “And the girl?”

Jones blinked.  “She says goodbye to her brother – the poor bastard – and walks out of the airlock, taking responsibility for her own actions,” he said.  He grimaced at the thought.  “It doesn’t matter.  She still had to die.  What other choice did she have?”

He shrugged.  “That’s why you got the craft here,” he added.  “The President hoped that you could use them to develop weapons that could be turned against the aliens before they finish devouring us and move on to you.  What other choice do we have?”
Chapter Ten

Chicago, USA (Occupied)
Day 111

Edward Stalker tensed, one hand on his concealed pistol, as he stepped through the lobby and into the deserted apartment complex.  It had clearly been abandoned in a hurry and it showed.  Broken bags, forgotten clothing and toys and bundles of rubbish littered the floor.  He almost drew his weapon as he sighted what looked like a dead child on the ground, before realising that it was actually a walking-talking doll, made up to look like a five-year-old girl.  He’d been warned to come alone, yet he would have killed to have someone at his back.  Walking into a possible trap wasn't wise.

His gaze sharpened as he read the message on the wall.  Anyone else who wasn't a Marine wouldn’t have recognised that there was a message at all, but he’d been trained to look for messages in odd places.  It provided directions to one of the apartment complexes, thankfully on the ground floor.  The upper floors would be far too easy for any enemy force to block off and trap everyone who came to the meeting.  He slipped along a darkened corridor, still clutching his pistol, and relaxed slightly as he encountered the second sign.  He pulled his balaclava over his face, concealing his identity, and opened the door.  A figure stepped out of the darkness and pointed a pistol directly at his face.

“Oh say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light…”

“Not while the evil days come not,” Ed countered.  The obvious response would have earned him a pistol shot in the face.  The figure stepped back and beckoned him into the darkened room, revealing three other figures wearing masks of their own.  It galled him that he didn’t know who they were – even though one of them was clearly a Marine like him – although he did understand the need for security.  The aliens didn’t play fair.  If they captured him, they’d convert him into one of the Walking Dead and he’d spend the rest of his life serving them as a loyal slave.  “All present and correct?”

“Don’t get smart,” the sole woman said.  Edward thought of her as the Bitch Queen.  She wore a garment that revealed nothing beyond her femininity, as if it protected her from the world.  Perhaps it did; but the aliens wouldn’t hesitate to treat her as badly as a man, if they caught her.  “Show me your eyes.”

Ed locked eyes with her for a long second.  The Internet had been full of advice on how to detect one of the Walking Dead.  They might have looked normal, but their eyes seemed dull and dead. The longer one spent with them, he’d been told, the more obvious it became that something was very wrong.  She nodded and looked at the next man.  Ed did the same.  If one of them had been captured and converted, a hundred alien warriors might be on the verge of breaking into the apartment and capturing them all.

“This room is secure and has been checked,” the Bitch Queen said, finally.  Ed shrugged.  They might be able to clear out human-designed surveillance systems, but no one knew what an alien listening device would look like, or if it could be detected.  It stood to reason that such an advanced society would have advanced methods of keeping a covert eye on people.  “However, we will not remain here for long.”

“What a shame,” one of the other men said.  Edward thought of him as Muscles.  He looked like an insane bodybuilder, or perhaps someone who had taken too many steroids.  “We could have had a hand of rummy before we went back to our wives and daughters.”

“Quiet,” the second man said.  He and his companion – Edward thought of them as Pinkie and The Brain – scowled at Muscles.  “The longer we remain here, the greater the chance that a roving patrol will pick us up.  I hardly need to remind you how disastrous that would be.  What do you have for us?”

“A chance to strike a real blow against the Orcs,” the Bitch Queen said.  “So far, we’ve gone after their footsoldiers and little else.  Now we’re going to really make them hurt.”

Edward frowned.  His team had attacked two other alien convoys and planted over a dozen IEDs all around their operating area, as well as a daring raid on an alien-occupied building that had come terrifyingly close to disaster.  He’d killed aliens, yet there seemed to be no limit to their numbers, and parts of Chicago had paid the price for his actions.  How else could they hurt the aliens?

“We have a source inside the Green Zone” – the term had appeared just after the aliens had taken over the heart of the city’s government and stuck – “who was able to supply us with information about our noble Mayor’s schedule for the next few days.  Don’t ask who gave us the information.  Let’s just take the opportunity to really hurt the aliens by taking out the Mayor.”

The Brain spoke into the shocked silence.  “The aliens have the Green Zone locked down tight,” he said.  “We couldn’t get anyone through their barricades without being detected.  They really clamped down hard on movement there,”

Edward nodded.  The aliens had forced out anyone who wasn't willing to cooperate with them, without regard for their possessions or their former homes.  The mayor, his family and his cronies had been permanently installed there, along with the senior officials who helped keep the city running.  Experience had shown that the only way into the zone was through one of two gates, where alien warriors checked ID and scanned incoming civilians with handheld scanners.  An attempt to slip a bomb through the dragnet had failed and the resistance fighter had been killed.

“He’s not going to be in the Green Zone,” the Bitch Queen said.  “We’ll have at least two chances at him over the next few days.  Three days from now, the asshole is going to be officiating at the opening of the new Heath Centre, where the aliens have provided some of their medical technology for the use of the human workers.  Apparently they have a few hundred people with serious disabilities or infectious diseases lined up to be the first to be healed.  It’s going to be a big publicly stunt for the Provisional Government.  It’ll be an even bigger one for us when we blow it and the Mayor to hell and gone.”

There was a long pause.  “Tell me something,” Pinkie demanded, finally.  “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

The Bitch Queen rounded on him.  “I’m as sane as I have ever been in my life,” she snapped back.  “This is a perfect opportunity to go after the bastard!”

“You’re talking about blowing up a medical clinic just to get one man,” Pinkie said.  “Or do you believe that the aliens really intend to eat the people they say they’re going to heal?  Do you think it’s a trick of some kind?  What did those people do to deserve to die?”

“Many of them became infected with AIDS through their own stupidity,” Muscles put in.  “It might teach them a few lessons.”

“I was unaware that stupidity carried the death penalty,” Pinkie said, angrily.  “What about the disabled and walking wounded?  God knows there’s been more injuries in this fucking city in the last couple of months than we had in the past decade!  Do they all deserve to die?”

The Bitch Queen opened her mouth, but Edward spoke first.  “We cannot strike a medical centre,” he said, firmly.  “The Mayor might be a legitimate target, but hundreds of innocents are not.  And, for that matter, what about the bad publicity we’ll get after we blow up a centre designed to help people?  They won’t be hailing us as heroes of the resistance, but dangerously insane terrorists!  We’ll be public enemies numbers one through five.

“And, less you forget, we need public support.  A single phone call from the wrong person could – would – bring the aliens down on our heads.  What happens if we kill a disabled man whose wife knows where one of our bases is located?  Why won’t she pick up the phone and tell the Orcs just where to go?  Forget morality or ethics, if you like – we need public support!  Killing the Mayor won’t be popular if we cover the ground with hundreds of dead innocents.”

“He’s right,” The Brain said.  “We cannot strike a medical centre.”

The Bitch Queen leaned forward.  “And how long will you keep your scruples when we may be fighting this war for the next fifty years?”

“Long enough,” Edward snapped.  His honour as a Marine forbade massacring civilians deliberately.  Even enemy citizens deserved a chance at life.  “What’s the other opportunity to hit him?”

The Bitch Queen scowled, but nodded reluctantly.  “They’re opening a recruitment branch here for a division of the Order Police,” she said, tartly.  “A few thousand young men are going to be recruited here and transformed into alien servants, if not Walking Dead.  They’ll be given a few weeks of training and then set loose onto the streets to help keep order, right out of the enemy commander’s playbook.  The Mayor is going to visit the centre in seven days – or thereabouts; his schedule might change on very short notice – to give it his official blessing.  That’s our second chance at hitting him outside the Green Zone.”

Her eyes hardened.  “The only possible victims will be collaborators and their media groupies,” she added, coldly.  “Do they deserve to live?”

“No,” Muscles said.  He clenched his fist.  “They chose to serve the Orcs and bear arms against their fellow Americans.  That’s outright treason in any book.  They deserve to die.”

“Many of them are trying to feed their families,” Pinkie said, softly.  “They don’t have any other employment, or prospects for the future, apart from serving the enemy and acting as their police.  Many of them see it as a chance to moderate contact between the Orcs and us.  God knows, it’s something we need desperately.  Every time the civilian population gets caught up in a brief battle, the results are…unpleasant.  They’re caught in the middle.”

“I understand that some of them may feel that they have no other choice,” Edward said, “but we cannot allow that to deter us from striking at them.”

Pinkie leaned forward.  “Who are we to make such decisions?”

“We’re the ones who swore to carry on the fight until we liberated our country or died at alien hands,” the Bitch Queen snapped.  “Or have you forgotten that we’re under occupation?  You’ve seen the reports from the Internet.  They’re slowly transforming our country into a slave labour camp!  The longer it takes for us to overcome our fancy scruples, the more time they’ll have to put the entire country into lockdown and complete the job.  I don’t know about you, but I am not going to let my kids grow up under their jackboots.”

“I understand,” Edward said.  “What do we do now?”

“The obvious question,” The Brain said.  “Does the Mayor deserve to die?”

Pinkie frowned.  “Shouldn’t we push this question up the chain?”  He asked.  “What about our senior leadership, or the President?  Should we sentence the Mayor to death on our own authority?”

“Our standing orders say that we may target collaborators at will,” Edward pointed out.  “The Mayor is very definitely a collaborator.  I would say that the choice is clear.”

“I think that you have appointed yourself as his defendant,” the Bitch Queen said, to Pinkie.  “Tell us why we shouldn’t kill His Honour and rid the country of a stinking corrupt political figure who currently blows the Orcs.  Or don’t you have an answer?”

Pinkie’s face, what little could be seen of it, flushed bright red.  “I have no defence,” he said, “yet we do not know what is going through the Mayor’s mind.  Is he a willing collaborator or is he acting the way he is because his family is under threat?  If the former, he deserves to die and by thunder I’ll hang the bastard myself, but if it’s the latter…can we condemn a man for trying to keep his family alive?”

“And how many families has your client managed to kill, even indirectly?”  The Bitch Queen demanded.  “Surely there are limits.”

Muscles agreed.  “And let us not forget that the Mayor has gone well beyond merely helping them out of fear,” he added.  “He has done far more than just the bare minimum.  I don’t know what is going through his mind, or what’s driving him…”

“Ambition,” The Brain said.  He was the only Chicago native among them.  “His Honour has always been ambitious.  I suspect that he sees the aliens as his ticket to power on a global scale.  Rumour had it that he was already planning his run for President in two years.  If the Party had accepted him, if he’d raised the funds…”

He shook his head.  “He’s right,” he said, nodding to Muscles.  “The Mayor has become a willing collaborator.  I don’t really care what motivates him.  I just want him dead, killed to send a message to all other would-be Quislings.  We’re coming to get you.”

“And besides,” the Bitch Queen added, “taking him out in the midst of other collaborators would send a powerful secondary message all of its own.  Nowhere is safe, nowhere.”

“The Green Zone is pretty safe,” Muscles scowled.  “They could just lurk there until we die of old age or enemy action.”

“Or until we bring out the mortars,” Pinkie said.  “A few random shells every day would serve as a powerful message in itself.”

“How true,” Edward agreed.  On one hand, it would shock hell out of the collaborators.  On the other hand, the aliens would probably retaliate harshly against the mortar teams and any civilians unlucky enough to be in the area at the time.  “It might convince them that nowhere is truly safe.”

“Poor bastards,” Muscles snickered.  “Poor little Quislings, so helpless and vulnerable…”

“That’s enough of that,” the Bitch Queen said.  She glanced from face to face.  “Shall we vote?”

“Death to the Mayor,” Muscles said.  “Kill the bastard and have done with it.”

Pinkie nodded.  “Kill him,” he said.

“Agreed,” The Brain said.  “My dear?”

The Bitch Queen glowered at him.  “Kill him,” she said.  “And you?”

Edward smiled to himself.  “Death,” he said.  Part of his mind was appalled.  They had just sentenced a man to death without a fair trial, or even a chance to defend himself before a jury of his peers, yet there was no choice.  How could they kidnap the Mayor and put him on trial?  The Bitch Queen was right.  They couldn’t leave the Mayor in place, even if he was acting under heavy duress.  He had to be removed.  “And which of us gets the task?”

“You,” the Bitch Queen said.  “Don’t forget to make sure that the bastard suffers.”

“I’ll settle for killing him,” Edward said.  “Is there any other business?”

No one spoke.  “Then I’ll head off back to my base,” he said.  “Give me five minutes before the next person leaves.”

He left the room and tore off his balaclava, before walking outside and away from the abandoned apartment.  The evening had become darkness in the time he'd spent at the meeting, a darkness barely broken by glowing streetlights.  The aliens had declared a curfew over the entire city in hopes of preventing resistance fighters and drug lords from operating at night – anyone picked up by an alien patrol was either added to the work gangs or was never seen again – but it wasn't always enforced.  He could hear, in the warm night’s air, gunshots in the distance.  Perhaps someone was having a go at an alien patrol, or perhaps humans were fighting humans.  There was no way to know.

A shape emerged out of the gloom and ambled towards him.  Edward raised his weapon and the would-be mugger thought better of it, giving him a shit-eating grin and wandering off in the distance, coat pockets clinking with glass bottles.  The street bums seemed to have been the only ones prepared for the alien occupation.  Edward considered going after him and breaking his neck to prevent him harming others in the future – chances were, he would have mugged and raped people in the chaos already – but there was little point.  Besides, some of the homeless worked for the resistance and kept an eye on the aliens, curfew or no curfew.  And, probably, some of them worked for the aliens or the collaborators.

He glanced up as one of the alien heavy transports raced overhead, heading out northwards towards Canada.  The Canucks hadn’t been invaded, as far as he knew, but they had to cope with tens of thousands of refugees from the United States.  Canada was a small and very vulnerable country to anyone who could reach it, having grown used to depending on the United States for its defence during the Cold War.  The Canadian Air Force wouldn’t be able to stand off the aliens for long if they decided that they wanted Canada, one day.  Who knew?  Perhaps the aliens would find maple syrup to their liking.

The building they were using as their temporary base loomed up in front of him and he checked it out carefully before entering through the rear entrance.  They’d prepared the building for rapid demolition if the aliens stumbled across it – anyone who came in the front entrance would walk right into four Claymore mines, among other surprises – although they couldn’t pretend to be innocent civilians.  A person with half a brain cell could tell that the building had been prepared as an ambush site.

He smiled as he passed through the second layer of defences and down into the basement.  The informant had told them seven days.  By then, he would have come up with a plan to kill the Mayor…and show everyone what happened to collaborators.  They’d never forget it…