Christopher Nuttall - The Trojan Horse

No, Toby knew; she didn’t have to explain. If the devices — the bugs — were so tiny, they could be taken anywhere by the unwitting host, turning loyal Americans into unknowing traitors. How long had it been on his arm? Toby was cleared for everything, a silent observer of secure briefings covering everything from defence to the ongoing economic crisis. He was loyal and yet he’d betrayed his country. And if there had been a bug on his arm, how many others were carrying their own unwanted guest?

“The transmissions,” Toby said, finally. “What did they say?”

“We don’t know,” Gillian said. “The real problem is simple. They cannot have come from Earth.”

“The Galactics,” Toby said. The conclusion was inescapable. So were the implications. “They’re spying on us.”

“So it would seem,” Hanover said. The Englishman leaned forward. “MI5 has been tracking a worrying series of meetings between the Galactics and people from… shall we say vested political interests? As far as we can tell, the Galactic bases in the EU have been seeing the same curious pattern of behaviour. There’s good reason to suspect that they’ve been holding such meetings in Russia and China as well.”

He sighed, deeply. “Who are they meeting? Political leaders — often those with the least stake in the establishment; businessmen with interests that may be harmed or helped by alien technology; media editors and newspaper men… and what are they saying in those meetings? We don’t know.”

Toby scowled. “You don’t do follow-up debriefs afterwards?”

“Not everyone is willing to talk,” the CIA Director admitted. “We cannot force American citizens to disclose details of confidential discussions — it hasn’t been that long since the Cancer Drug scandal. But connected with these alien… bugs, it poses a worrying question — what are the Galactics truly playing at? What do they really want?”

Toby remembered the brief moment he’d locked eyes with one of the aliens and shivered, feeling cold. “Another question,” he said. “How many of these bugs are there?”

Gillian shook her head, slowly. “It’s impossible to tell,” she said. “They’re very hard to detect — we only knew you’d been bugged because the device was transmitting at the wrong moment, when it was too close to one of the sensor stations we positioned throughout the White House. If we assume that each of the transmissions we’ve picked up comes from a separate bug, we could be looking at upwards of five hundred devices within Washington alone. The real number could be much higher.”

His father had often lectured Toby on the value of good intelligence. Given a series of nearly undetectable bugs, the Galactics could snoop into almost anywhere they wanted to go. Their long list of guests at one of their bases was a cross-section of American society, the movers and shakers who made America work. The Galactics would know everything the American Government knew before too long. And then — what would they do with the information?

“We carried out a set of checks on government databases as well,” Gillian added, dourly. “There’s always been a hacking threat from China and other rogue states — and our own stable of hacking anarchists who think that information should be free. There is some real proof that a number of secure government databases have been hacked, but we have been unable to track down the perpetrators. In several cases, the FBI thought they’d finally gained evidence to convict known hackers, but they always had alibis.”

“One attack came out of England,” Hanover added. “We checked it out and found… we found a woman who barely knew anything about computers. She couldn’t have hacked into her own computer, let alone the most sophisticated computer security system in the world.”

“Someone hacked into her computer and turned it into a remote platform for further hacking,” Gillian said. “It’s not an uncommon hacking pattern, but this one seems to stop dead at her computer. The level of technological sophistication in these attacks is light years ahead of anything we’ve got, or anyone else for that matter.”

“Apart from the Galactics,” Toby said, bitterly. He looked up as a thought struck him. “Did they stick a bug on the President ?”

Gillian’s blue eyes seemed to refuse to meet Toby’s brown eyes. “We don’t know,” she admitted. “We can only really detect the bugs when they’re transmitting, unless we put someone through a full security check. And even then it’s patchy. If we hadn’t known that you were bugged…”

Toby could complete the sentence for himself. “I would have walked out of this meeting and the aliens would have known at once,” he said. The thought refused to fade from his mind. “ Do they know we know?”

“We don’t know,” Gillian said, when her superior seemed disinclined to answer the question. “Their hacking attacks weren’t completely subtle; their bugs may have been removed naturally…”

“I think we have to assume that they do know that we found the bugs,” the CIA Director said. “It would be too much of a coincidence to lose a bug on one of the few people with direct access to the President.”

Toby swallowed hard. “But what do they want ?”

Despite himself, it came out as an almost plaintive cry. His throat felt dry; his palms were sweaty. He’d been there when the President had been briefed on the nuclear weapons at his command, the weapons that could wipe out a good percentage of the planet and contaminate the rest for thousands of years. The President had been shocked, but Toby hadn’t understood — until now. There were things so big as to be almost impossible to grasp until they slammed into one’s head.

“We don’t know,” the CIA Director said. “One; they mean everything they said to us and they’re monitoring us to ensure that they know what we’re doing with their gifts. Two; they’re hostile and they want to monitor us to ensure that we don’t catch on to what they’re doing before it is too late.”

Toby shuddered. “They’re spying on us, covertly,” he said. “That doesn’t suggest friendly intent.”

“It would seem so,” the CIA Director agreed. “At the very least, they don’t trust us — we’re naked before them, almost defenceless, and they’re still spying on us.”

The thought was almost impossible to grasp, despite his fears over the true intentions of the Galactic Federation. But then — the aliens had been very careful in what they’d said to the human race. Very little of it was actually useful and they’d presented almost no technological data. The fusion plants they’d provided for the United States were sealed units, with human scientists barred from studying them. A handful of other gadgets had yielded little more information.

On one hand, it was easy to understand a certain caution in dealing with the human race. The Galactics had pointed out many issues that suggested a certain insanity surrounding the human race, everything from fouling the environment to cheerfully committing mass murder and even genocide over trifling issues such as religion. Who knew how the human race would behave if given access to the stars? Even a society that had renounced war might be concerned by the possibility.

But, on the other hand, there was a sense of… shiftiness surrounding the Galactics and how they dealt with the human race. They had been careful to withhold details, even details that could be of no conceivable military use, from their human questioners. No one even knew how many of them there were, or…

“All right,” he said. “What do we do about it?”

“That is the question,” the CIA Director said. “Can we take this to the President?”