Christopher Nuttall - The Trojan Horse

The Colonel frowned. “I remember when people were paranoid about the Japanese buying up everything,” he said. “That didn’t last forever.”

“This is different,” Toby said. “The worst-case scenario is that the aliens have been quietly muscling their way towards controlling interests in everything from heavy industry to the media. Some of their allies are known stockbrokers with years of experience, or political lobbyists who have plenty of skills and no scruples. And one thing keeps echoing through my mind.

“They want us to get rid of the army — every human army on Earth. And that makes no sense; surely, if they were telling the truth, human armies would wither away soon enough without encouragement. Even if we kept a million men under arms, what possible threat would it pose to the Galactic Federation? One asteroid on our heads and it’s bye-bye Earth.”

“They want to invade,” the Colonel said, flatly. “You don’t destroy an army unless you fear that it will be in a position to oppose you.”

“And the only way the army could oppose the aliens is if the aliens came down to Earth,” Toby finished. “And I am telling you, right now, that the odds are seventy-thirty in favour of the aliens getting what they want, or claim to want. The United States will sign the treaty forming a global government and we will lose ninety percent of our armed forces — and all the nukes will be gone.”

The Colonel nodded, slowly. “And you want us to do what about it?”

Toby gathered himself, meeting his father’s eyes. “They have access to all of our databases,” he said. “I have a few allies working on options, but without the President’s authority there are limits to what we can do — and they’re keeping a very close eye on the President. The NSA sent a team through the White House and there are at least seven tiny bugs monitoring the President. And if we remove them, they’ll know that we found them. And then God knows what will happen.

“I need — the country needs — someone off the grid,” he added. The irony was almost killing him. He’d called his father a nut more than once, a man convinced that the government was permanently on the verge of grabbing all the guns — just before returning the vast majority of the country’s population to debt-peonage. And he wasn’t even the craziest of the bunch. There was a guy who believed that driving licences were illegal and unconstitutional, as if the Constitution recognised a driver’s right to get others killed through bad driving. “We need to prepare for the worst.”

“Invasion,” the Colonel said.

“More like a slow takeover,” Toby said. “Each step will be presented as logical and reasonable; each step will be rewarded… but each reward will make us more dependent upon them. And one day we will wake up and discover that we’re nothing more than slaves.”

One of the strangers leaned forward. “But slavery is uneconomical for pretty much anything apart from sexual favours,” he said. “Why would they want us ugly bastards as slaves?”

Toby had wondered about that himself. If the aliens had merely wanted the Earth, exterminating the human races wouldn’t pose any problems for their advanced technology. A handful of abductions would give them the knowledge required to tailor a virus to humanity’s DNA, which could then be dropped on the planet with a suitably long gestation period. And then the entire human race would drop dead and the aliens would land, once the bodies had decayed and the stench became tolerable. No; the only answer that made sense was that the aliens wanted slaves — and that suggested that they were interested in securing humanity’s industrial base. But it was primitive compared to theirs… why would they want it?

“I wish I knew,” he admitted. He looked up at his father. “I won’t mince words; there is a very real danger that they might have followed me here. I may have just put your lives in terrible danger. And yet we have no reason to think that they might know about you. Your country needs someone capable of resisting them when they take over…”

“Or someone capable of taking the fight to them now,” the Colonel said.

”Someone expendable,” Bob Packman said. The former CIA officer met Toby’s eyes. “And someone completely deniable… right?”

Toby didn’t attempt to lie to them. “Yes,” he said. “If something goes badly wrong and the whole plan is blown, the government will swear — largely truthfully — that it knew nothing about you. We cannot risk tapping much in the way of available resources from the government or the CIA or anyone who might be watched by the aliens…”

“I understand,” the Colonel said. He looked, just for a moment, as if he were proud of Toby. Toby tried hard to conceal just how much that meant to him. “I will speak to some of my friends and start putting a second network together. You go back to Washington and keep us informed.”

“Yes, sir,” Toby said. “And thank you for everything.”

Washington DC

USA, Day 20

“I’m afraid I can’t let you go any further.”

Jayne nodded at the policeman as she halted in front of the tape someone had thoughtfully stretched across the doorway. POLICE LINE — KEEP OUT it read, as if anyone would just run past the burly policeman and into the cramped apartment. From her vantage point, she could see a handful of stuffed bookcases, a sofa that had clearly been dragged halfway across the room — and a chalk outline on the ground where the dead body had fallen. A handful of police photographers were wandering around, taking photos with monotonous regularity, but little else seemed to be going on. Washington had too many murders per month and not all of them, whatever the Washington PD claimed, were solved.

There was little spectacular about the death of Albert Grossman, honours student at Caltech and current wage slave in a company that cared more for brute labour than it did for the hopes and aspirations of the young men and women who were entering the job market. Jayne was honest enough to admit that under ordinary circumstances, she would never have given the murder a second thought — but Albert Grossman was also Arnie Pie of the Blogger Association Network. His murder was odd enough, but a handful of bloggers had checked the details and raised a disturbing question. What were the odds of at least eight anti-alien personages being killed within the same few days? Six bloggers, a newspaper reporter and a fact-finder for CNN’s website had all died within days of one another — and the only thing they had in common was that they had all raised concerns about the Snakes.

She looked up at the policeman. He wasn’t someone used to the streets, really; he’d admitted that he was more of a glorified dispatcher. Someone who owed the BAN a favour had arranged for him to escort Jayne to the murder scene; Jayne had been privately amused to watch his eyes straying from her breasts to her rear end, as if he’d never been given any training in how to interact with the media. Not that she cared, really; if he was attracted to her, he might be more willing to answer her questions.

“He didn’t deserve to die,” she said, bluntly. It was easy to inject a note of sorrow into her voice. Death was never amusing, even when the person in question deserved to die. And who was she to make such a judgement anyway? “Do you know who did it?”

She hoped that it would be taken for a naïve question. “I’m afraid we have little to go on,” the policeman admitted, finally. “No one saw anything; no one knows anything; no one is prepared to admit to anything without a lawyer. This is one of the places where everyone minds their own business and doesn’t speak to the police, which turns it into a very satisfactory place for anyone engaged in criminal activity. There are at least ten druggies in this area, along with five prostitutes and at least one suspected robber. But we can’t pin anything on him and if we rounded up the prostitutes, they would be replaced within the day.”