The Colonel nodded. He’d seen the studies. The Chinese Government had spent most of the Clinton Administration stealing every piece of computer software they could get their hands on, sometimes aided and abetted by members of an administration the Colonel considered a national mistake. And some folks in the CIA had wondered if that couldn’t be turned to their advantage, if they couldn’t penetrate systems the Chinese didn’t fully understand and take control of them. If they could do that, they’d thought, they could effectively control the Chinese nation — and no one would ever know what they’d done. How could the Chinese fight back when they couldn’t trust their weapons?
Nothing had ever come of the plan, of course. There were too many risks involved for it to be anything other than a theoretical study. But he could see how it applied to their situation. If Toby’s friends were right and the aliens had calmly hacked their way into every government database, they’d know everything they needed to know to draw up plans for the invasion. The implications were devastating. A poker player couldn’t hope to win if his opponent knew what cards he was holding in his hand.
“I’m in shock,” Packman said. “Twenty days ago, the world changed forever ; nothing has changed on the surface, but you can feel it moving underwater. This is the calm before the storm. God alone knows what will happen when the storm finally hits.”
The Colonel shrugged. Packman had always had an imagination. It was one of the reasons his superiors had asked him to leave. “We’ll need to think about it carefully,” he said. He disliked cell phones personally and insisted that they be turned off in the house. He’d even ordered his guests to leave them behind when Toby had briefed them, something that might have saved their lives. It was quite possible to turn a mobile phone on remotely and transform it into a spy. “And we need to find a way of operating under their radar.”
Susan stuck her head through the door. “Are you not coming?” She demanded. “The food is getting cold!”
The Colonel knew better than to defy his daughter over her cooking. Like her mother, Susan was tough and very determined to control the female sphere — which included cooking and wedding planning. If he’d skipped dinner, she wouldn’t have forgiven him for months, just like Mary. At least Mary had understood when he’d been called back to his unit for an emergency drill that had led nowhere. Susan’s husband was on the other side of the world.
“Coming,” he said, hauling himself to his feet. He’d kept himself in peak physical condition for a man of his age, but he was suddenly chillingly aware that he wasn’t anything like as strong or active as he’d been before his retirement. “Come on, Bob. You don’t want to get her angry at you.”
“Quite right,” Susan agreed. Standing against the light, she looked terrifyingly like her mother. “And if you don’t eat a full plate of stew, you won’t get any desert.”
They reconvened in the living room after the dinner. The Colonel rubbed his stomach — he’d eaten more than was good for him, but it had tasted so good — and started to pour the coffee into a number of mugs. Susan and everyone else not directly involved with the resistance — for the Colonel had already determined to resist, whatever else happened — hadn’t been invited to the meeting. There was no point in risking the lives of anyone who hadn’t already committed themselves to the fight.
He thought, just for a moment, of Toby. His youngest son was right in the heart of enemy territory, Washington DC. The Colonel, like many survivalists, treated Washington with great suspicion, an attitude that had only hardened over the years that Washington’s politicians had fiddled while the country burned down around them. It was one thing to talk — and political leaders could talk the hind leg off a donkey — but it was another thing to act… and nothing he’d seen had convinced him that Congress could pass an act to save its life, let alone the entire country. The first step in solving a problem was recognising that there actually was a problem and Washington’s stable of politicians would prefer to avoid admitting that for as long as possible. Who knew where the blame might fall?
“Let’s be clear about this,” the Colonel said. “We are at war with a force of unknown power. We don’t know what they are, we don’t know what they want and we don’t know what they can actually do. They have most of our politicians in their pockets and large parts of our society trust them more than they trust any human. All of our data consists of little more than wild-assed guessing. If there is anyone here who wishes to back out and hide, rather than try to fight, say so now. It will not be held against you.”
“Respectfully suggest,” Coleman grated, “that you stop insulting us and get down to business.”
The Colonel smiled. “Right,” he said. “The aliens are telling us to disarm. There’s only one logical reason for them to want us to disarm and that’s because they intend to invade — and intend to deprive us of the tools needed to resist them effectively. We are staring down the barrels of an alien invasion. God alone knows what they want from us, but I doubt they think that it is anything that we would give to them willingly.”
“Perhaps they want to eat us,” Packman suggested. Food seemed to have restored his good humour, although his eyes still looked haunted. “Maybe diced human is the food of choice among the stars.”
“Doubt it,” Coleman said. “Does anyone here believe that the Chinese or the Russians or the Arabs wouldn’t take the opportunity to sell troublemakers to alien butchers if it meant they would have access to alien technology?”
The Colonel couldn’t disagree. There were plenty of governments on Earth that didn’t put the well-being of their own citizens on their list of priorities, let alone anywhere near the top. It was one of the many reasons why he was glad to be an American. If African governments were prepared to allow famines to take place because the people starving belonged to hostile tribes, they wouldn’t hesitate to sell living humans to the aliens. Africans had been selling their fellow Africans into slavery long before there had ever been a United States of America. And the Chinese… if they were prepared to carry out a religious and ethnic genocide in Tibet and other regions, they wouldn’t hesitate to sell them off to butchers. Hell… he wouldn’t have put it past his own government.
“No,” the Colonel said. “They want something and the only answer that makes sense is that they want humanity’s industrial base. Anything else they could get by wreaking the planet or exterminating the human race.”
“No offense, but that can’t be right,” Packman said. “Why would they want humanity’s industrial base when we can barely lift a few tons into orbit? Building a ship like theirs would take at least fifty years; we’d have to build the tools to make the tools long before we even started work on the ship. What the hell do they want from us?”
Dawlish stroked his chin. “Maybe we’re more advanced than them in some areas,” he suggested. “The Japanese moved ahead in civilian computing technology…”
“Because we had all of our brightest minds going into the military,” Packman countered. “I find it impossible to believe that they don’t have everything we have and a great deal more…”
His voice trailed off, slowly. “Oh.”
The Colonel looked up at him. “Oh?”
“They need our industrial base because they don’t have one of their own,” Packman said. He shook his head slowly. “If they need to use our industrial base, it suggests that theirs is somehow lost — or missing.”
“Or maybe they intend to upgrade ours once they have control,” Coleman suggested. “How long would it take them to boost what we have to a level that can be used for building something comparable to theirs? For all we know, it’s cheaper to build a new industrial base here rather than ship equipment in from thousands of light years away…”