Their Darkest Hour

Chapter Fifteen

North England

United Kingdom, Day 8

Haddon Hall was one of the original stately England manors, built before the English Civil War by a loyalist who had lost his life fighting for Good King Charles. It was a regal building, although hopelessly impractical for military purposes, surrounded by gardens that regularly won awards in regional and national contests. Some people would have found it a paradise, a chance to play at being an English aristocrat. Gabriel Burley found it maddening. It was a prison by any other name, a place where he could do anything — except leave. The handful of security staff — really soldiers wearing civilian clothes — were polite and friendly, but they wouldn’t let him leave. He was too important to risk falling into enemy hands.

The thought made him snort in disgust as he paced the massive library. Two years ago, he’d been a junior MP with ideals, ideals that were being worn down by contact with real-life politics. How could he hope to achieve anything without compromise — and by compromising, he was steadily turning into a true politician, a man who compromised everything for the sake of power and position. A man like Alan Beresford.

He snorted again as he picked up a book, glanced at it and put it down again. His host had given him the run of the house, and the use of an extensive collection of books, DVDs and even old-fashioned records, but it was still a prison. He couldn’t concentrate on anything, apart from his feelings of hopelessness. His position as Prime Minister was meaningless, save in name only. The invasion that gripped the country proved that, whatever he told himself; he could hardly command the aliens to leave, could he? Their forces held the entire country now, surrounding cities and trapping the civilian population within their homes. God alone knew what they would do when the resistance went to work. They’d certainly shown no sign of any scruples when dealing with unarmed civilians.

The television remained bland, with old movies and soaps being played regularly, rather than the BBC’s news programs. Gabriel knew some of what was going on all over the world, but it didn’t help his mood. The aliens were tightening their grip — Dear God, had it only been eight days since they’d revealed themselves and descended upon a shocked and paralysed Earth? Gabriel almost wished that they would discover his hiding place and try to snatch him. At least running away would be doing something. Instead, all he could do was wait and hope that someone — somehow — found a way to hurt the aliens enough to make them leave. The military hadn’t been too hopeful. As long as the aliens dominated space above Earth, they could call down strikes against rebel towns and cities — or, if worst came to worst, exterminate the human race. Gabriel remembered all the films he’d seen with asteroids crashing into the planet and shivered. The aliens would have no trouble pushing an asteroid towards Earth and the human race wouldn’t be saved by a patriotic scriptwriter. It even made him long for Independence Day.

There was a cough behind him and he jumped, one hand falling to the pistol he’d been told to carry at all times — and save the final bullet for himself, if the aliens caught up with him. Brigadier Gavin Lightbridge-Stewart seemed rather amused — Gabriel hadn’t even realised that he’d entered the room — but Gabriel was pleased to see him. He hadn’t been allowed an internet connection, not when the aliens might use it to track him down. Outside news — accurate outside news — only came in fits and starts.

“Prime Minister,” Lightbridge-Stewart said, gravely. “I trust that you are well?”

“I’ve told you to call me Gabriel,” Gabriel said, impatiently. He didn’t know where Lightbridge-Stewart had made his headquarters or even any operational details at all. What he didn’t know he couldn’t tell — and he had no illusions about his ability to hold out under torture. Or perhaps the aliens had perfect lie detectors and truth drugs. “What have you heard from the… outside?”

Lightbridge-Stewart smiled. “Elements of the Royal Scots are preparing fall-back positions in the Highlands,” he said. “The aliens may control the cities, but they’ll find extending their control into the Highlands a little harder than they’d prefer. They may even decide to abandon the Highlands altogether.”

Gabriel nodded, half-wishing that he could go north and join the Scots. There were plenty of areas in England where humans could hide out from the aliens, but Scotland had a smaller civilian population at risk. But he knew that he could never take an active role in the fighting to come. They couldn’t risk their Prime Minister, even if the position was meaningless.

“King Harry isn’t adjusting well,” Lightbridge-Stewart added. “He wants to fight back, not hide out somewhere in Scotland. But I’m afraid we don’t have much choice.”

“I can’t disagree,” Gabriel said. He hadn’t even been in politics when there had been an almighty political struggle over deploying then-Prince Harry to Iraq and Afghanistan. In the end, he’d been allowed to go — as long as it wasn’t made public. It was ironic, really; the British Monarchy had held mostly ceremonial roles, yet Harry hadn’t been allowed to be a public sign that the Monarchy was willing to fight too. What made Harry any better than the hundreds of other soldiers who’d lost their lives in Iraq or Afghanistan? There had been no good answer, save that the enemy would have made capturing him a priority. His presence would have risked the lives of other soldiers.

Lightbridge-Stewart shrugged. “There’s some good news,” he said. “And some bad news as well, I’m afraid. We managed to recover a dead alien body in the retreat from Salisbury Plain and get it to a… well, a covert military medical research establishment. The doctors there took some time to dissect the body and draw a number of conclusions. I brought copies of their reports, but the interesting detail is that they’re really not that different from us.”

“They look like leathery dinosaurs,” Gabriel observed. It still pained him that he hadn’t seen any of the aliens at first-hand, but his minders had been clear. He couldn’t risk being recognised. “And yet they’re not that different from us?”

“Compared to what we were expecting, yes,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “Which isn’t really good news in the long run. They can make use of our planet and presumably eat our crops — although I don’t know if they’ll actually like them. However, the doctors believe that they cannot catch our diseases — which rather puts the leash on any War of the Worlds scenarios we might have been hoping for.”

Gabriel frowned. “And can we catch their diseases?”

“They don’t think so,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “But they don’t really have any samples of alien diseases to study.”

“No,” Gabriel agreed. “They wouldn’t.”

He’d studied history, back when he’d thought about becoming a historian. Back when Europe had discovered America, they’d brought their diseases with them — diseases that the Native Americans had had no resistance to. Smallpox alone had killed millions, leaving a void for the Europeans to expand into and eventually control. The empires built on native labour had collapsed; the empires based on settlers had survived and prospered. And if an alien disease got loose on Earth…

It might not even have to be natural, he realised. He’d certainly had enough briefings about the dangers of biological warfare, up to and including genetically-modified diseases that were resistant to every known vaccine. The aliens didn’t have to reshape one of their own diseases to produce a monster that would exterminate humanity. They could simply rely on a simple human disease, with a little modification. Britain had no — official — stocks of Smallpox, but if the aliens had captured the stores in Russia, or America…

He pushed the thought aside. There was no point in worrying about it. They were at the mercy of the aliens and would be for years to come.

“The analysts think that the aliens will probably start growing their own crops on Earth sooner rather than later,” Lightbridge-Stewart said. “Unless they’ve somehow managed to produce stable wormholes that reach from planet to planet, their logistics have to be rather touchy. Growing their own food will allow them to send more weapons and military supplies instead…”

“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.”

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.”