Christopher Nuttall - The Trojan Horse

Shaking his head, Spencer walked forward as the tanker lumbered to a halt. He couldn’t see the driver’s face behind the windscreen, but that was hardly surprising. The rain was pelting down now, as if even the weather disapproved of the aliens. Or maybe the aliens were manipulating the weather from orbit. God knew they’d shown enough remarkable tricks before they’d shown their true faces. Maybe they’d promised their collaborators sunshine and rainbows while drenching the rest of the world with cold rainfall.

The driver’s door didn’t open. Puzzled, and a little alarmed, Spencer stepped up and pulled at the handle. The door opened, revealing a makeshift doll — life-sized, wearing male clothes — grinning at him. There was no one else in the cab. He stared at it, his tired brain refusing to quite process what he was seeing, and then he threw himself backwards. It was far too late.

Mathew Bracken, who was officially dead, loved C4. It was a common feeling among the SF community, who firmly believed that there was no such thing as enough C4. Rigging up the gas tanker with enough explosive to destroy the roadblock utterly had been easy; it had been more complicated to rig the tanker so it could be driven by remote control. In the end, they’d had to cannibalise a set of remote-control cars to construct the control system — and even then it had been flighty. But it had sure paid off on the night. The explosion smashed the roadblock as if it had been made of paper, throwing a pair of police cars dozens of meters away from the blast. They caught fire and burned merrily, adding an eerie light to the scene.

He exchanged a grin with two of his men and settled down to wait. It wasn’t long before they saw the vehicles driving towards the burning roadblock. The collaborators had been smart enough to keep a quick-reaction force on permanent standby, knowing that they would have to seal any hole in their ring of steel before insurgents started getting in or out of Washington. Mathew waited until they’d stopped near the burning cars, and then carefully targeted their positions. The pod people had made one elementary mistake. Their leader was obvious to the sniper waiting with Mathew’s team.

“Fire,” Mathew ordered, quietly.

The SEAL team opened fire as one. Carl, his sniper, took out the enemy leader, while the others contented themselves with random bursts that forced the enemy team to dive for cover. An RPG, fired at one of the enemy vehicles, caused it to explode into a fireball, illuminating the eerie scene. The enemy team hadn’t trained together very well; instead of firing back, or retreating in good order, they either hid and cowered or ran for their lives. Mathew had once had reservations about shooting men in the back. Now, with his country under enemy occupation and governed by puppets and traitors, he had no objection to killing them all by whatever method seemed quickest. Besides, the runners would probably scream for help when they reached somewhere out of the line of fire. Better that the enemy believed that their response force had run into a phantom army than to have any idea just how few resistance fighters there were on the front lines.

A brilliant flash of light lit up the horizon, followed rapidly by a pearl of thunder. For one moment, Mathew thought that someone had popped off a nuke or that the aliens had decided to intervene directly, before realising that it was neither. One of the other squads of insurgents had been planning a nasty surprise for the enemy; if the resistance was lucky, they’d spend long enough wondering just what the fuck had happened to allow the resistance to withdraw safely. But once they figured out that there was no radiation — or forced their men forward anyway — the cat would be out of the bag.

“Cover me,” he muttered. Tom and Markus provided cover, shooting at any enemy heads that showed themselves, while Mathew slipped down towards the ambush scene. The human eye was naturally lazy, attracted to light. He should be invisible in the shadows, at least until he started shooting. An enemy body appeared in front of him and he almost squeezed off a round before he realised that the enemy’s head had been blown off. He must have caught a series of rounds from the light machine gun the SEAL team had placed close to the ambush site.

A trio of enemy fighters were hiding behind the remains of a car, trying to fire uncoordinated bursts back towards their ambushers. It wouldn’t have been a bad tactic if they’d known what they were doing, but as it was they were doing little more than forcing the SEAL team to duck from time to time. Spray and pray hadn’t worked in the Middle East and it wouldn’t work in America. They had no idea Mathew was behind them until he shot them all neatly in the back of the head. A badly-wounded enemy fighter, lying on the ground, waved desperately to Mathew; one look and Mathew knew that no medical centre would be able to save his life. He hesitated, remembering that he was looking down at a collaborator, and then remembered simple humanity. A single shot ran out and the wounded soldier went onwards into the next world.

Four more SEALs materialised out of the darkness and advanced forward, their weapons and combat goggles sweeping for enemy fighters. One fighter, a young man barely out of his teens, was found trembling behind one of the smashed containers they’d used to build their roadblock. The SEALs dragged him out, tied his hands, and placed him up against one of the wrecked cars. He wasn’t a hardcore enemy fighter, Mathew noted, nor did it appear that he had any real training at all. He’d already shat himself and the stench was noticeable, even against the stench of burning gasoline.

Mathew pointed his gun right into the young man’s face and he started to whimper. Mathew felt nothing, but disgust. It was possible to feel sorry for the men and women who had been forced into serving the Snakes — either through having their family as hostages or by being brainwashed into becoming pod people — yet it was impossible to feel anything for a young man who had abandoned his country to serve the aliens of his own free will. He clearly wasn’t a pod person, or he would have gone for Mathew’s throat by now. Pod people had no sense of self-preservation. They could have given the Iraqi insurgents lessons in suicide tactics. The aliens had wiped them of everything, but a desire to serve, whatever the cost.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” Mathew said, pressing the gun against the young man’s mouth. “You answer my questions and I’ll leave you here to be found by your friends. If you lie to me, or I think you lie to me, I’ll cut you up badly and leave you here to bleed out and die. Do you understand me?”

The young man nodded frantically. Mathew wasn’t too surprised. The real hard cases, the men who wouldn’t talk even if they were put through the water treatment or beaten to within an inch of their lives, were normally recognisable to a trained interrogator, who would put them aside for careful interrogation. It would hardly be the first time Mathew had extracted information from an enemy fighter who had gotten in way over his head, but it had always left him feeling dirty. Torture, however disguised, was not honourable. It was unworthy of anyone who wanted to call himself a trained soldier.

“Good,” Mathew said. “Now… let’s see, shall we?”

He bounced questions off the young man’s head for seven minutes, while the remainder of the SEALs searched the dead bodies and removed any number of ID and useful tools. They’d have to be dropped off at one of the safe houses for careful inspection before they were taken anywhere near one of their hiding places; Mathew wouldn’t have put it past the aliens to slip a tracking implant on the ID or one of their tools, just so they could track it back to the resistance headquarters. The young man knew very little, unsurprisingly. He’d been seduced into joining the aliens because his family was starving and his father had been thrown in one of the detention camps. A not unfamiliar story to Mathew, but one that had been largely unknown in the United States, at least before the aliens had arrived. They were building a real police state, with death camps and a constant heavy surveillance of everyone who lived within their boundaries. How long would it be before they broke the human race down to nothing more than slaves?