“And there’s nothing we can do about it,” Gabriel said. “I don’t suppose that anyone else has come up with a possible solution? Maybe hacking into their computers and shutting down their weapons…?”
“This is the real world, unfortunately,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. He frowned, suddenly. “What I can tell you is that there is a certain… crude nature to most of their technology. We’ve captured samples of their weapons and taken them apart to study — in many ways, their weapons are actually less advanced than our own. That could be just them being practical — the more complex a piece of kit, the greater the chance it will break in the field — or their overall technology level could be less advanced than we’ve assumed. And for that matter…”
He hesitated. “It’s hard to be sure, but their tactical doctrine sucks,” he added. “If they didn’t have those starships in orbit, we would have beaten them — and so would almost every other First World nation on the planet. Hell, even the Saudis would have given them a very hard time. I don’t know who they’re used to fighting, but they clearly haven’t learned much from the experience. The analysts have studied the problem, yet they can’t see any clear solution. It’s possible that someone else gave them their technology…”
Gabriel stared at him. “Someone else sold them their technology…? Who?”
“There’s no way to know,” Lightbridge-Stewart admitted. “Another alien race, we presume — or maybe they captured technology from another alien race and somehow discovered how to duplicate it for themselves. We certainly didn’t hesitate to sell tanks and guns to the Middle East, even though there was a strong chance that they would wind up being pointed back at us. For all we know, they stole the starships they have in orbit — and the weapons they’re using against us on the ground may be their own designs.”
“But there’s no way to know,” Gabriel said. He shook his head slowly. “Is there any good news?”
“Well, I’ve had a team of signals experts — very bright boffins, these lads — studying the alien communications system,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “It really isn’t as advanced as our own — but then, we don’t really understand their language yet so we may have problems unlocking some of their secrets.” He smiled, briefly. “But we do have some idea of how their command-and-control network functions. It seems that their junior officers don’t have much independence of action. They may not even have the ability to call in strikes from orbit without permission from higher authority.”
He looked down at the floor, shaking his head. “God knows we had enough problems with calling in strikes while we were in Afghanistan,” he said. “It may account for odd delays in their response times — we managed to get troops out of positions we knew would be bombarded before the hammer finally fell. Or we may be making a dreadful mistake because their system looks familiar to us. They’re aliens and their idea of logic may not make sense to human minds.”
“They’ve been taking prisoners and registering the entire population,” Gabriel said. “Doesn’t that make sense from a human point of view?”
“I’m very much afraid so,” Lightbridge-Stewart agreed. “We have — had — political considerations in how we treated civilians caught up in occupied zones. It was never politically possible to impose our control with an iron hand — and that cost us badly. The aliens, on the other hand, seem to be registering our people with an eye to keeping them under firm control — and weeding out those who might be able to resist. Luckily we managed to get most of the TA and reservists called up and out of the cities before the aliens started arresting military personnel. God alone knows what they’re doing with them.”
Gabriel shivered. The reports had all been the same, even though they’d come from places as far apart as Southampton and Aberdeen. All civilians had to be registered — and military personnel were taken away, along with police and other emergency service workers who refused to collaborate. No one knew where the aliens had taken them, but Gabriel had no difficulty picturing them being executed by alien gunfire… or simply tossed from alien shuttles into the Pacific Ocean. The aliens had set up detention camps, but they all seemed to be for civilians. He could only hope that the military personnel were kept alive, elsewhere. The alternative was too depressing to contemplate.
“And we don’t know what they have in mind in the long run,” Lightbridge-Stewart added. “Perhaps they intend to isolate fatties and have them cooked for dinner — we believe they could probably eat human flesh.”
Gabriel felt sick. “I don’t think that any civilised race would want to eat human flesh,” he said — but then, what was a civilised race? He’d thought that humanity, for all its faults, was making progress towards a better world for all, yet the aliens had knocked humanity down within two days of their arrival. The reports from Africa — where the aliens had almost no presence at all — suggested that mass chaos was spreading across the continent. Was the inner savage as far removed from the civilised man as he wanted to believe? “I’m sure they have something less… extreme in mind for us.”
“I don’t know,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “I just don’t think we’ll enjoy it when the penny finally drops.”
“I haven’t enjoyed anything since the aliens arrived,” Gabriel said, ruefully. He hesitated. Even now, there were things he didn’t feel comfortable discussing. “Is there… anything we can do about their damned puppet?”
“You mean assassinate him?” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “I admit that we’ve been looking at the possibility. But the aliens keep him under very tight guard — it’s almost as if they think we might take a shot at him.” He smiled. “We’re working on the possibility, Prime Minister, but it may take some time.”
He hesitated. “And we have to decide if we’re going to wage war on collaborators as well as the aliens,” he added. “Some are joining up because they need to feed their families; some are joining up because they believe that it’s for the best… and some are joining up because they want power. And as long as the aliens have thousands of expendable humans to deploy against us, it will be a great deal harder to convince them to withdraw.”
Gabriel shivered. Western Governments had been alarmingly sensitive to casualties and bad publicity, something their enemies hadn’t hesitated to use against them. The terrorists had targeted soldiers, intent on causing as many fatalities as possible, and done their best to provoke incidents that could be spun against the Western troops. Any civilian deaths were always blamed on the West — and the fact that they’d been used as human shields by men who wore civilian clothes, or caught in bombs planted by their fellow countrymen, was never mentioned.
But they had no way of knowing what the aliens would consider acceptable losses — or bad publicity. Perhaps their homeworld had protest marches, with thousands of young and idealistic aliens marching to ‘save the human,’ or perhaps they were a fascist state, with all dissent ruthlessly suppressed. And if it was the latter, they might be prepared to endure terrifying losses to keep Earth firmly under their control — or blow up the planet if they felt that they had no choice, but to withdraw.
“So we go after the aliens first,” Gabriel said, “and only go after the collaborators if they’re nasty bastards who abuse their power?”
“Sounds like a plan,” Lightbridge-Stewart agreed. “But there will be casualties, Prime Minister. We don’t even know how many civilians died in the last few days.”