Once, Gabriel would have been appalled — hell, he still was appalled. But there was nothing he could do about it. The aliens couldn’t be ordered out of Britain by the Prime Minister.
“We have managed to set up a reasonably secure communications link with America,” Lightbridge-Stewart said, after a moment. “Most of the American personnel in Britain want to go home and fight there, although that will be tricky. The aliens aren’t allowing big ships to leave harbour — we can get them to Ireland, which hasn’t been occupied, but I don’t see how we can get many of them to the United States. It may be possible to use submarines…”
“But that would mean risking a boat,” Gabriel said, slowly. Lightbridge-Stewart nodded. The remaining submarines in the Royal Navy — as well as ones belonging to America, France and the rest of Europe — had been ordered to run silent, run deep. The aliens didn’t seem to be capable of tracking submerged boats from orbit, but they could see a surfaced submarine and drop a rock on it. “Are the Yanks going to take the risk?”
“I don’t think so,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “They took higher absolute losses than we did and their country is much more heavily occupied. I suspect they can probably keep an insurgency going for longer than we can, but…”
He shrugged. “If we could just get them out of orbit, we could deal with their garrisons on the surface,” he concluded. “But as long as they’re in orbit, they can hold a gun to our heads.”
Gabriel couldn’t disagree. They could hurt the aliens, but they could never beat them. And if they couldn’t beat them, was there any point in fighting at all? And yet, if they surrendered, there was no way of knowing what the aliens had in mind for the human race.
“Thank you for coming,” he said, cursing his own weakness. “Will you stay for dinner?”
“I have to link up with a couple of others,” Lightbridge-Stewart said, reluctantly. “We have plans to make. And then we can start reminding the aliens that we exist.”
Chapter Sixteen
Long Stratton
United Kingdom, Day 10/11
The convoy looked like something out of Iraq, or Afghanistan. It comprised a handful of trucks, each one carrying a dozen policemen, and a pair of alien Armoured Personnel Carriers. It was escorted by a pair of helicopters, bristling with weapons, that flew elaborate patterns over the vehicles. From her vantage point, hidden near the town, Alex wondered if the alien pilots were showing off, or genuinely concerned about the threat of portable antiaircraft weapons. There was no way to know, but she suspected the former. The aliens, despite appearances, didn’t look as if they were expecting trouble.
She gritted her teeth as the aliens started to dismount their vehicles, weapons at the ready, followed by their tame policemen. The internet had been ranting and raving about collaborators — and so many rumours that it was difficult to know what was fact and what was fiction — but actually seeing collaborators in the flesh was a different story. They looked as if they were confident, expecting no opposition — and they might be right. The BBC had been claiming that the remainder of the British military had been destroyed; looking down at the aliens, Alex started to wonder if they had been telling the truth. She might be the last surviving servicewoman in Britain.
No, she told herself firmly. That couldn’t be true. She was isolated, but there would be others out there somewhere, waiting for the chance to hit back at their new enemies. And even if she was alone, she still had her duty. All she had to do was wait until the right moment. Until then, she just had to watch and allow the memories to become burned into her mind. The aliens and their collaborators had arrived in Long Stratton.
They’d developed their own procedure for securing towns and villages by now. The policemen used loudspeakers to summon all of the townsfolk out of their homes and ordered them to wait on the green while the aliens searched the village. Looking at their big hulking forms, Alex felt a chill running down her spine. She would have sooner believed in a rogue military officer launching a coup than in aliens, even though she’d seen their aircraft. The clattering of the helicopters grew louder as one skimmed over her position, so low that Alex was convinced, just for a few moments, that she’d been spotted. There was no way to know what the townspeople were telling the policemen down below.
She shuddered. The aliens had made their instructions quite clear; everyone in the country was to be registered, fingerprinted and given an ID card — no exceptions. And the internet had made it clear that the moment they discovered that she was a RAF pilot, they would take her away and no one would know what had happened to her. So she’d taken the risk of hiding, along with a handful of young men who were willing to resist the aliens. Alex hoped that it wasn’t all just mindless bravado. There was no way to know what someone was made of until the shit hit the fan, by which time it might be too late. It was one of the reasons why military training was so intensive, in the hopes of weeding out the unsuitable before it was too late.
And if her little band was caught…? There was no way to know. The aliens might simply execute them on the spot, or take them to one of their detention camps or… she shook her head, concentrating on the scene before her. One by one, the townspeople were being processed and registered. Smith and his wife had remained on their farm. They probably wouldn’t be processed until later — she hoped. And they’d been warned not to breathe a word about her…
One hand touched the pistol at her belt as the hours wore on. Watching made it seem almost surreal, with the aliens watching over their collaborators — their unarmed collaborators. Alex found that a warming sight; it was clear that the aliens didn’t trust the policemen with live weapons. Perhaps the police hadn’t been so badly subverted after all. But she couldn’t count on anything…
Down below, a scuffle had broken out. She peered, wishing she’d dared bring a pair of binoculars, trying to make out what was going on. The policemen had pulled a man out of the crowd, a middle-aged gentleman she didn’t know. Why… she realised why a moment later, just as she saw his crying wife and older children. He’d been in the army and returned to life as a civilian. It hadn’t been enough to save him, or his son. The young man had lunged at a policeman, only to be knocked down and arrested by another. God alone knew what would happen to them.
She gritted her teeth again, forcing herself to watch. Whatever else happened, she would not forget. And those who had been killed would be avenged.
Night was falling as she approached the disused barn, one that had once belonged to a farmer who had sold out and left the country. It had fallen into a dilapidated state, but her small team had done wonders to ensure that no light could be seen coming from the barn in the darkness. The aliens didn’t seem to patrol the country very effectively, yet there was no point in taking chances. They were taking quite enough with the elderly explosives as it was.
“They used to put this stuff in flour,” Archer was saying to his small group of students. “The Chinese would use it to smuggle gunk past the Japanese — it could actually be baked and eaten without poisoning the poor bastard who actually ate it. We may have to use it the same way.”
Alex frowned. The collection of weapons and explosives from World War Two had been looked after carefully, but an alarming number had decayed badly. Some of the detonator pens — designed for early IEDs — were unreliable. They’d been state of the art in 1940, Archer had assured her, but now… they would have to be careful. There were some nasty tricks that could be played with even disused explosives, yet… she had nightmares where one of the students accidentally blew up the barn or the weapons store. At least they’d managed to scatter smaller dumps around the area. Losing one wouldn’t cost them everything.