She picked up her overnight bag and ran out of the door, glancing down at her pager to see where she was going. A massive plume of smoke was rising up over London, reminding her of the hellish first days when the aliens had arrived. At least they’d managed to get most of the wounded to their own homes, she told herself as she started to run. Five minutes later, she saw an ambulance and flagged it down, hoping that the driver would have time to stop. He did, allowing Fatima to climb onboard before he gunned the engine again, heading towards the plume of smoke. She felt sick as she realised where they were going. Gilmore Technical College had played host to several of her friends, back when they’d dreamed of careers. And now it was just a pile of rubble.
A number of Incident Coordinators had arrived and taken charge, thankfully. They’d been missed during the desperate attempt to treat the wounded in Central London, during the invasion. Fatima didn’t even bother to throw them accusing glances — they were collaborators, after all — as she scrambled down from the ambulance and ran towards their position. Police and firemen were helping the wounded away from the fires, trying to get them processed and into the queue for medical treatment. She closed her ears to their screams and pleas, knowing that there was little she could do to help. God alone knew if they had enough medical supplies on hand.
She rapidly found herself assigned to triage. It wasn’t something they’d practiced before, outside of a pair of paranoid exercises they’d done before the invasion. She glanced at the first casualty, swiftly assessed his condition, and marked him down as category two. He had a broken leg and was probably in shock, but he’d survive without immediate medical treatment. It broke her heart to leave him without help, yet there was no choice. The next person, a young girl barely out of her teens, was too badly wounded to live without immediate hospital treatment. Fatima marked her down, knowing that she would probably never be taken to hospital and receive the treatment she needed. At least she was too badly injured to be aware of her surroundings. If God was kind, she would pass away without ever waking up.
The hours seemed like days as they tried to clear up the mess. Over two thousand humans had been in the building when the bomb exploded, along with a number of aliens. Most of them were dead, or so badly wounded that the only thing the doctors could do was inject them with painkillers and watch them slip away. One of the bodies, plonked down in front of her, was clearly inhuman. She forgot her fear and helpless anguish as she stared down at the alien body. The inner bone structure was very different from a human skeleton, as far as she could tell; despite their great size, they seemed almost weaker than the average human. But the internet insisted that the aliens had an advantage in hand-to-hand combat… their leathery skin, far tougher than human skin, might help hold them together. Perhaps they were less used to trauma than humans.
A leathery hand pulled her away from the body. She jumped… and found herself staring up into an alien face. The alien pushed her aside with casual ease, allowing two of his — she assumed that it was a male, although there was no way to tell — comrades to pick up the body and cart it away to one of their floating trucks. They weren’t bothering to tend to any of the human wounded, or even help moving away the dead. As far as she could tell, they only cared about themselves.
“Don’t get angry at them,” a soft voice said. She looked up to see a policeman, staring down at her. There was something damned and suffering in his eyes. “Just be grateful they’re letting us handle this.”
Fatima opened her mouth to deliver an angry retort about collaborators — and then she swallowed it, knowing that it would do no good. What choice did they have? And what choice did she have? She had opened herself to charges of collaboration by coming to help the wounded, even though most of the wounded were humans. And to think she’d wondered why Iraqis had had so much trouble deciding which side to support during the war…
She pushed the thought aside and returned to work. There was an unending stream of casualties to tend to, and hopefully save. And then perhaps she might find something else to do with her time.
From his vantage point, Alan Beresford watched as the plume of smoke slowly faded away. It had been nearly four hours since the blast and the emergency services had worked like demons to cope with the damage. There was no threat to any other building, at least as far as they could tell, and they had a preliminary list of the dead. And as far as they were concerned, Alan knew, they’d done an excellent job. It was a pity that there was nothing left of the bomber, but the blast had been powerful enough to bring down a fairly large building. The bomber himself would have been reduced to atoms.
But that wasn’t the important point, Alan knew. The aliens didn’t share details about their security — or their long-term objectives — with him, but he did know that they had taken a handful of losses recently. Small, compared to the casualties they’d suffered during the invasion itself, but irritating. And all the more irritating because they’d trusted Alan to provide security for their people. They’d given him power and responsibility and all they’d asked was that he kept his word. What would happen to him, Alan asked himself, if they decided that they no longer wanted him to control the country for them? Somehow, he had no doubt that the aliens would simply kill him and put an end to it.
The thought was intolerable. He’d risen high in pursuit of power — he wasn’t going to let it end without a fight. And if the aliens decided that he was expendable… no, it was unthinkable. He wasn’t going to look as ineffective as the British Government had looked against the IRA, or the more recent threat from Muslim fundamentalists. He’d show them that Alan Beresford was still a good investment. And if a few innocents got mashed in the gears, well… one couldn’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.
He turned and faced his small Cabinet. And small it was. Many of the ministers who’d served Prime Minister Gabriel Burley — wherever the hell he was — were dead, or in hiding. It seemed unlikely that they would be able to remain undiscovered forever, but that was small comfort. He’d had to promote a handful of his cronies, a number of men who owed him favours, and the senior surviving police officer in London. Some of them followed him because they believed in him, others followed because of the dirt he had on them… and at least two were there because they had nowhere else to go. But that could change, Alan reminded himself, savagely. How long would it be before one of them realised that they could make their own deals with the aliens? And then how long would Alan last?
“We have a problem,” he said, addressing his Media Officer. Catherine Stewart knew where the bodies were buried, sometimes literally. Alan had once heard a joke about how many people would attend the funeral of a world-famous columnist, just to make sure that the old bat with the poison pen was finally dead. It applied just as much to Catherine, whose blonde good looks concealed a razor-sharp mind and a complete absence of scruples. “The scrum who did this killed innocent Londoners. They have to be found. I want you to make sure that that party line gets out there right away, without any dissent. Try and prevent the internet from taking any other line.”
Catherine nodded. It hadn’t taken her more than a week to start building her own empire — but then, she was the only source of employment for countless spin doctors and muckrakers who no longer had anywhere else to go. They’d make damn sure that the media toed the line, or he’d have some of them shot to encourage the others. And he wasn’t joking either. Given enough time, he was sure that they could shut down most of the internet in Britain, but it seemed different to do without taking down what remained of the government communications network. The aliens had refused to allow them to use the alien network.