Christopher Nuttall - The Trojan Horse

An object was moving across the heavens. The Colonel shivered, wondering if it was one of the alien starships — or perhaps the International Space Station, a bold effort dreamed up in the days before the aliens had taught the human race just how inadequate its imagination actually was. He stared at the blinking light, wondering if the aliens were looking back at him, before shaking his head and entering the farmhouse. The die had been cast the moment he’d agreed to allow Toby to speak to him and a handful of his most trusted associates. He could no more refuse to help form the resistance than he could refuse to serve his country in its hour of need.

Bob Packman met him in the sitting room. The others would have gone to eat — the Colonel’s daughter had promised them a feast and had been disappointed when Toby hadn’t stayed — but he’d waited for the Colonel. He looked haunted, his eyes constantly glancing around like a man with a guilty conscience — or a man who felt terrified beyond belief. The Colonel couldn’t blame him. The CIA trained its officers to look at the big picture and the big picture was terrifying. How could anyone hope to stick a spanner into the alien plan to take over the Earth? And what did the aliens really want?

“I’m terrified,” Packman admitted. The Colonel shrugged. He’d been terrified back in the Gulf, when Saddam had looked like a viable threat and the pundits were touting the Iraqi Republican Guard as the latest version of the Waffen SS. And then Desert Storm had rolled over the Iraqis and Saddam had survived by the skin of his teeth. The only thing preventing the Allies from removing his vile regime right there and then had been politics. “What do they want?”

The Colonel sat down beside him, ignoring the smell from the next room. A memory rose up inside his mind, mocking him. Every time she’d given birth, Mary had insisted on a full Thanksgiving dinner the moment she’d recovered enough to cook it. It might have been nowhere near Thanksgiving, but the Colonel had known better to disagree with her — and besides, she had cooked a wicked turkey. And then she’d died in childbirth and the Colonel had ordered the Turkey they’d bought for the feast thrown out, knowing that there was little to give thanks for. Mary had deserved better than to die giving birth to her youngest son.

“It isn’t what we prepared for,” Packman said, softly. “We told ourselves that when the Crash came, we’d run away up here and hide from the chaos. We had guns and ammo and food — enough to ensure that we lived through the first few months. And we told ourselves that the only things we had to fear was mutant zombie bikers and government agents coming to take our food to feed the starving grasshoppers from the big cities, the fools who depended on the government to take care of them. How we laughed when we thought about lynching the government agents, hanging the fools who tried to tell us that the Second Amendment didn’t apply to us — and standing in judgment over who we would let into our new paradise.

“We told ourselves that by running away and hiding, we would inherit the Earth,” he added. “And now there’s nowhere to hide. No hiding place down here.”

The Colonel didn’t disagree. In truth, there had always been a degree of fantasy surrounding survivalist preparations, but having the ability to imagine the disasters that might consume the nation was a vital part of the survivalist mentality. And running away and hiding? There were some disasters so great that the only thing one could do was bunker down and hide, waiting for the chaos to subside and the vast starving hordes to die off. The Colonel’s Christian faith told him to help the helpless, but not at the cost of one’s own chances of survival. And besides, he had no faith in the vast masses who depended on the government for their daily bread to behave when the government fell apart.

“Look at us,” Packman said. “We’re just as dependent upon modern society as the rest of the world — and that makes us vulnerable. Every single goddamn cell phone is a potential spy. Anything we post on the internet — anything we download from the internet — becomes something they can use to track us. They can probably slip into our databases and alter details as they see fit, making it impossible for us to even remember the truth. How can we fight when we can’t even trust our own weapons or memories?”

He shook his head. “They’re carrying out a goddamned soft coup and half of our population is probably quite prepared to welcome the New World Order,” he concluded. “And what’s going to happen to us then?”

The Colonel nodded. He’d seen the studies. The Chinese Government had spent most of the Clinton Administration stealing every piece of computer software they could get their hands on, sometimes aided and abetted by members of an administration the Colonel considered a national mistake. And some folks in the CIA had wondered if that couldn’t be turned to their advantage, if they couldn’t penetrate systems the Chinese didn’t fully understand and take control of them. If they could do that, they’d thought, they could effectively control the Chinese nation — and no one would ever know what they’d done. How could the Chinese fight back when they couldn’t trust their weapons?

Nothing had ever come of the plan, of course. There were too many risks involved for it to be anything other than a theoretical study. But he could see how it applied to their situation. If Toby’s friends were right and the aliens had calmly hacked their way into every government database, they’d know everything they needed to know to draw up plans for the invasion. The implications were devastating. A poker player couldn’t hope to win if his opponent knew what cards he was holding in his hand.

“I’m in shock,” Packman said. “Twenty days ago, the world changed forever ; nothing has changed on the surface, but you can feel it moving underwater. This is the calm before the storm. God alone knows what will happen when the storm finally hits.”

The Colonel shrugged. Packman had always had an imagination. It was one of the reasons his superiors had asked him to leave. “We’ll need to think about it carefully,” he said. He disliked cell phones personally and insisted that they be turned off in the house. He’d even ordered his guests to leave them behind when Toby had briefed them, something that might have saved their lives. It was quite possible to turn a mobile phone on remotely and transform it into a spy. “And we need to find a way of operating under their radar.”

Susan stuck her head through the door. “Are you not coming?” She demanded. “The food is getting cold!”

The Colonel knew better than to defy his daughter over her cooking. Like her mother, Susan was tough and very determined to control the female sphere — which included cooking and wedding planning. If he’d skipped dinner, she wouldn’t have forgiven him for months, just like Mary. At least Mary had understood when he’d been called back to his unit for an emergency drill that had led nowhere. Susan’s husband was on the other side of the world.

“Coming,” he said, hauling himself to his feet. He’d kept himself in peak physical condition for a man of his age, but he was suddenly chillingly aware that he wasn’t anything like as strong or active as he’d been before his retirement. “Come on, Bob. You don’t want to get her angry at you.”

“Quite right,” Susan agreed. Standing against the light, she looked terrifyingly like her mother. “And if you don’t eat a full plate of stew, you won’t get any desert.”

They reconvened in the living room after the dinner. The Colonel rubbed his stomach — he’d eaten more than was good for him, but it had tasted so good — and started to pour the coffee into a number of mugs. Susan and everyone else not directly involved with the resistance — for the Colonel had already determined to resist, whatever else happened — hadn’t been invited to the meeting. There was no point in risking the lives of anyone who hadn’t already committed themselves to the fight.