Robin glanced outside through a broken window and saw that the mob was getting stronger. There was little hope of anyone coming to help on the ground, unless they were armed and willing to cut down enough of the gang members to convince the others to flee. It wouldn’t be long before they decided to go after the two trapped policemen — and it wouldn’t take their leaders long to guess where Robin and Wiggin had fled. He glanced down at the crowd again before heading up the stairs. There should be a way to get onto the roof from the stairwell.
The stench seemed to grow stronger as they raced up the stairs. Robin had made arrests in places like the estate before and knew that the closed doors hid all sorts of crimes — and people living their lives of quiet desperation. A drug dealer, a prostitute and her pimp, terrorists, racists… all hidden behind closed doors. The BBC might prattle on about the benefits that alien rule would bring to the country, but he doubted that any benefit could help those trapped on poor estates. Very few people born and bred on such an estate ever managed to climb out and build a proper life for themselves. The pressure just to sink into criminality was overpowering. There were some girls who were grandmothers at thirty, assuming they lived so long.
At the top of the stairs, he glanced up and saw the hatch leading to the roof — and a small set of metal climbing handles. Quickly, he climbed up and pushed at the hatch, before making the mistake of looking down. Dizziness almost overcame him, but he closed his eyes and pushed at the hatch again. It opened and fell to one side with a loud bang, almost as loud as a gunshot. He scrambled out onto the roof and peered out over London. A dozen fires were burning brightly in the distance, towards the centre of the city. He could hear the sound of alien weapons being fired, suggesting that the rioters were trying to take out the alien patrols. Maybe they’d even succeed…
“Call for a helicopter,” he ordered, as Wiggin scrambled up beside him. Peering over the side of the building brought on another fit of vertigo, but he managed to overcome it long enough to realise that the crowd had realised that its hostages were missing. They were thronging around the block, looking for trouble. “Tell them we need an emergency pick-up right now.”
He closed the hatch and dragged a number of fallen bricks over to make it difficult for anyone to reopen it from inside the building. The rioters had probably used the rooftop as a place to defend their territory in the past, throwing bricks down towards their enemies. Wiggin joined him and between them they stacked up nearly fifty bricks. It would be almost impossible for someone to open the hatch, Robin told himself, and hoped that he was right. After their escape, the crowd wouldn’t be feeling merciful to the policemen if they caught up with them.
The sound of helicopter blades grew louder and he allowed himself a moment of relief as a police helicopter came into view. A rope ladder was already falling down towards them as it slowed and came to a hover directly over the estate. The sound of the crowd grew louder as Wiggin took hold of the ladder and started to scramble up into the helicopter. Robin heard a series of bangs and thuds from under the hatch that suggested that someone was trying to push the hatch open and come climbing out onto the roof. He took tight hold of the rope ladder and climbed up himself, following Wiggin. The helicopter seemed to bank in the sky the moment he reached the top and was helped into the cabin, tilting away from the estate and heading back towards Central London. From overhead, entire streets seemed to be jammed with rioters, or protesters. He could see riot teams unleashing CS gas on some mobs, while leaving others to shout themselves hoarse. It looked as if London was dissolving into chaos.
“They want every available officer out manning the barricades,” the pilot called, as they flew lower. “The Leathernecks are moving up forces from outside the city. If we don’t put the rioters back in their box, they’re going to start mowing them down!”
Robin wasn’t alone in believing that more vigorous policing and less politically correct bullshit would do more for the city than any amount of urban improvement schemes, but there were limits. And the aliens wouldn’t hesitate to gun down thousands of humans to convince the remainder to do as they were told. He sat back and covered his eyes as the helicopter slowly came in to land at the makeshift New Scotland Yard. They’d be expected to go back out on the streets at once and he didn’t know if he had the energy. All he wanted to do was crawl into a bottle and die.
“Well, mighty master of all you survey,” Catherine said, dryly. “I think that some people are a mite upset.”
Alan Beresford ignored her. The new seat of government for the collaborators was a small fortress, protected by the aliens. It said something about how effective they were at dealing with urban mobs that no one had risked attacking them, even though the deadline for the return of the alien captive was counting down towards zero. But the remainder of London didn’t have that immunity to the chaos gripping the city. The entire city seemed to be out of the streets, trying to get out or to take down an alien or two before it was too late.
“You might have done better not to tell the world about the threat,” she added. “Just think about how long it is going to take to clear up the mess…”
“Shut up,” Alan snapped. He didn’t want to let her get under his skin, but there were limits to what he was prepared to endure. Catherine was preparing herself to challenge him and perhaps become the next Prime Minister — and tool of the aliens. “You know as well as I did that there was no choice.”
The aliens had made their feelings quite clear. They wanted their kidnapped officer back — and they were prepared to threaten mass murder to be sure that they got their way. Alan knew them well enough by now to know that they weren’t bluffing. In fact, he wasn’t sure that they had the ability to bluff. They seemed to prefer the simplest and most direct way of doing things possible — and if that meant a great many humans got hurt, they didn’t seem to care. Alan might have admired their ruthlessness if he hadn’t been all too aware that they would turn on him if he stopped being useful. And his usefulness might just have run out.
Alan had managed to get most of the city’s workers back to work, particularly ones who could help the aliens administer their new territory. The registration process had identified a vast number of people who could join the alien government and work overseas, perhaps in France or America. Alan had calculated that the aliens wouldn’t want to bring in locals if he could produce servants, even if they would be at risk from the local resistance fighters. But now most of his civil servants seemed to have gone on strike, or were being hunted down by mobs in London. The rest of the country wasn’t much better. Every city or large town that didn’t have an alien ring of steel keeping the population trapped was emptying out into the countryside, spreading panic and disorder over the entire country. It wasn’t as if they could all be fed outside the cities.
He glanced down at his watch. Two days, the aliens had said; two days for their kidnapped officer to be returned or else. And one of those days was nearly over. If he’d had a link to the resistance, he would have begged them to return their captive, if only because his usefulness would expire if the aliens decided that he’d lost control of his people. But there was nothing he could do, apart from waiting and hoping. It had been a long time since he’d prayed.