The machine guns mounted on the tanks opened fire, directly into the mob. Bright red blood seemed to splash everywhere as the bullets, designed to punch through thicker skin than humanity’s, tore through the mass of humanity. He saw human bodies disintegrate under the assault, coming apart and falling in a sickening pile of flesh. It wasn’t war, but a bloody slaughter. In seconds, hundreds of humans had been killed. The few survivors were screaming in pain, abandoned by the few who were able to run for their lives. The’Stig winced as the orders to advance came in through his headpiece, sending him forward. His feet seemed to slip on the blood-stained pavement, blood splashing everywhere. The handful of wounded humans were too badly injured to help, even if the Land Force had been inclined to assist humans too stupid to know not to charge tanks with sticks and stones.
Bit by bit, they cleared the human mob away. Panic was settling in, with thousands of humans running for their lives, abandoning others to the tender mercy of the advancing forces. He saw a handful of policemen, wearing the uniforms they’d been told to respect, staring at the troopers, their faces pale with horror. Hadn’t they realised what was going to happen? The’Stig slipped on another patch of blood and stared down at the young human who had lost his upper body. A life had been wasted when he’d chosen to join a futile and pointless protest march.
He snorted in disdain. And it had all been so futile. Didn’t the humans have the sense to know when they were beaten? He couldn’t feel proud of what they’d done. They hadn’t fired on the deadly humans, the ones who had been ambushing convoys and sniping at Land Force Bases. Instead, they’d killed thousands of humans who might have been useful, if they’d had some sense knocked into their heads instead of simply being slaughtered. The State would understand what they’d done, but would others? Even he didn’t want to go through it again.
His radio buzzed. “Clear the plaza,” the order came from above. “We’re bringing in prisoners to clear away the bodies. Others will dig a pit outside the city where they can be dumped.”
The’Stig snorted, again. Higher authority seemed stunned too. Who knew? Perhaps they would be so stunned that they’d change their tactics. Stranger things had happened.
Chapter Twenty-Two
North England
United Kingdom, Day 25
“We can’t go on like this!”
Gabriel couldn’t face the television set. For the last four days, the BBC had been broadcasting images from the riot in London — and its bloody end. Alien tanks firing directly into the crowd, alien soldiers crushing human skulls under their armoured feet, hundreds of orange-suited prisoners clearing away the bodies and piling them into trucks, the bodies being dumped into massive pits outside the city… the images were firmly burned into his mind. Nothing in Britain’s history, at least that he could recall, matched the sheer horror the aliens had unleashed. God alone knew how many humans had been killed in the riot. The BBC claimed that no aliens had been killed, or even injured.
The news had shocked the country. From what few reports Gabriel believed from the BBC, there had been other riots in Newcastle, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Birmingham. The aliens, however, had managed to cow most of the rioters; their soldiers had quelled the other riots by their mere presence. Most of the insurgency had slipped back to IEDs and attacks on collaborators and alien patrols, although much of it seemed to be random violence. It helped that almost all human communities had a common enemy in the Leathernecks. Violent groups that ran the political spectrum from neo-Nazis to Islamic fundamentalists and ecological pressure groups were actually working together to bleed the aliens.
But the country was bleeding too. The BBC was heavily censored these days, controlled by the collaborator government, but enough was leaking through to worry Gabriel. People were starving, families had been shattered… each disaster might have been tiny, on a planetary scale, but they added up to untold misery. Britain wasn’t supposed to be like that, he told himself, even during the Blitz they’d been spared the suffering inflicted on continental Europe by the Nazis. Britons saw disasters on television and donated money to help the dispossessed. They didn’t suffer disasters themselves. He’d once read a book where an extinct volcano in Edinburgh had come back to life, forcing British emergency services to cope with the disaster. They hadn’t done a very good job.
He sat back in his chair, trying to think. How could they convince the aliens to leave? But the aliens only seemed to respect force — and the entire human race hadn’t been able to convince them to back off. Barely a month ago, the United States had been so far ahead of the rest of the world that it could do almost anything it liked. It was now invaded and occupied, the massive aircraft carriers that had given the Royal Navy fits of envy sunk by rocks dropped from orbit. Russia and China had been crushed, the Chinese suffering the effects of their own nuclear weapons as well as alien KEW strikes. And Europe…
The latest reports, such as they were, suggested that Europe was suffering from famine. France and Germany, the two powerhouses of the European Union, had been crippled, the continent-wide distribution network for food breaking down under the pressure of the alien offensive. Eastern Europe had attracted less attention from the aliens, with the result that millions of refugees were thronging through the countryside, desperately seeking a safety that no longer existed. The war in Bosnia had restarted, with a dozen different groups trying to exterminate their enemies before the aliens decided to intervene. But why would the aliens bother to intervene? Their human enemies were killing themselves off nicely.
And all he could do was sit and watch as his country was taken apart. He stared around the library, at the old books lovingly collected by the library’s owner, and cursed himself for his weakness. His position as Prime Minister was meaningless in all, but name. Even if he were to issue orders, it was uncertain how many people would even hear them, let alone obey. The resistance seemed to be held together very loosely, if at all. He’d been assured that it was the only way to prevent the aliens from uncovering them all if they captured men from one particular cell, but it still felt flimsy to him. How long would it be before the resistance became nothing more than bandits?
A month. That was all it had been — and it felt as if he had been cooped up in his gilded cage forever. He thought, briefly, about the soldiers on the outside, providing security for his august person… did they feel resentment or relief that they were out of the fight? And how long would they stay out of the fight? The collaborators had offered a hefty reward for anyone who brought them Gabriel’s head, preferably not attached to his body. He wasn’t blind to the advantages the aliens would gain from having the legitimate Prime Minister as a collaborator, although he suspected that they wouldn’t find him as useful as they would have expected. The slaughter in London would have destroyed whatever legitimacy the collaborator government had once enjoyed.
But what could they do? The aliens held control over the high orbitals — if worst came to worst, they could pull out of London — or any other city — and drop rocks on it from orbit. He thrilled to the stories of ambushes and IEDs planted in positions where the aliens would run over them, but they could never force the aliens to retreat and abandon Earth. And what would happen if the aliens decided to simply exterminate the human race altogether?