Christopher Nuttall - The Trojan Horse

“All right,” he ordered. “Mount up.”

He climbed into the cab of the first truck and muttered a command. The truck burst into life and started heading down the road, back into Washington. Ahead of them, assuming that the aliens hadn’t changed their deployments again, was a roadblock manned by pod people. The aliens themselves seemed content to use their troops as a mobile reserve, rather than pin them down to guard roadblocks and mount random patrols. The Colonel could understand their feelings. Their manpower was far from unlimited, while they had vast numbers of pod people to throw at the resistance. The pod people were expendable. On the other hand, NATO had learned in Afghanistan that too few troops meant that counter-insurgency was impossible. The aliens might well lose control altogether, even if his plan failed. And then what would they do?

The Colonel shivered, thinking about the two crates that had been loaded into the back of the second vehicle. One contained the alien defector, who had volunteered to assist the human race in breaking its new shackles. The Colonel hated the thought of being dependent upon one of the Snakes, but there was no other choice. A shuttlecraft built for the Snakes would be very difficult for a human to pilot, even if it was a simple as driving a car. And besides, no human had any experience flying Snake shuttles. They’d been careful to limit the number of humans who had even been allowed to fly in their craft. The vast numbers of African troops who were being brought to America were flying in jumbo jets and smaller human-built aircraft.

They don’t have much of a logistics chain , the Colonel thought, coldly. We should have seen it from the start .

But hindsight was remarkably clear. Any fool could stand up and say that they would have done a better job than the poor sap on the ground at the time. Hindsight always illustrated mistakes that would have been far from obvious to the people on the ground, at the time. The Colonel, who was something of a student of history, knew that many decisions that seemed utterly absurd — the decision to drive on Stalingrad, the decision to attack Midway, the decision not to march on Richmond — had made perfect sense to the people on the ground, at the time. It was only hindsight that illustrated the decisions for the mistakes they were.

The Colonel nodded to himself, remembering the second crate. If it all went completely to hell, there was one last resort. But it could only be used once. The Colonel had no illusions. Whatever the outcome, it was almost certainly a suicide mission. It was why he had insisted on commanding it personally. Win or lose, they would go down fighting.

“Roadblock,” the driver commented, as brilliant spotlights lit up and glared down at the trucks. The Colonel had to put up a hand to protect his eyes. “Got your papers ready?”

The Colonel nodded, despite the thumping of his heart. If the papers had been fucked up, if they’d been betrayed deliberately or through simple human error, they were all about to die. The younger men might be able to cut their way out of the ambush and then flee, but there was no way the Colonel could leave. They had to hide the evidence that they’d had a defector, even if it meant killing the alien and everyone who knew about him personally. And he would have to kill himself, just to be sure…

“Open the window,” he ordered.

The window slid open, allowing the soldier on guard to stare up at him. “Papers,” he demanded. “Who are you and what are you doing here?”

“Routine reinforcement,” the Colonel said, passing him the folder of documents. The aliens had done well to create documents that would be very difficult to forge, but they hadn’t anticipated a traitor in their ranks. They’d created a new aristocracy of pull, yet it hadn’t occurred to them that their servants included a few men who wanted to see them overthrown. “Here are our papers.”

He tensed as the soldier studied them, and then passed them back up into the cab. “Proceed, sir,” he said. “Welcome to Washington.”

The Colonel kept his expression under tight control as they drove away from the roadblock and through deserted streets. If there were any lights on in the buildings, he saw no sign of them, leaving him wondering if the population was all dead. A lot of citizens had been killed in the fighting, or in reprisals launched by the aliens and their pod people. The reports had suggested that much of the population was starving, while the collaborators lived high and ate well. The Colonel ground his teeth together and swore revenge. Even if the plan failed, a great many collaborators were going to be killed.

He jumped out of the truck as soon as it pulled up outside the barracks. Sergeant Bracken met him outside, as agreed. The Colonel had had his inoculation against nerve gas, but the thought still worried him. It should have broken down into its components by now, he told himself sternly. It wasn’t something he needed to worry about, not compared to what they were doing and the potential consequences of failure.

“They’re all dead,” Bracken said. He was already wearing one of the enemy uniforms. The Colonel had wondered why the aliens had insisted on designing their own uniforms, before realising that the Snakes had as much trouble telling humans apart as humans had with telling Snakes apart. “And we have enough uniforms for you and your men.”

The Colonel nodded. “Good,” he said. He waved to the drivers and they took the trucks through the gate and into the warehouse complex. The soldiers would be dressed in enemy uniforms and ready to leave when the time came. There was a risk that they’d be attacked by the resistance — friendly fire was nothing of the sort, the Colonel knew — but it would just have to be accepted. Besides, they couldn’t take the risk of ordering the attacks to halt, or some bright spark on the enemy side would start wondering why the resistance had called off its attacks.

He pulled on the enemy commander’s uniform with only a little difficulty. The Colonel was in good shape for his age, but he knew that he wasn’t the man he had been any longer. It was easy enough to play the collaborator, yet wearing the alien uniform irritated him. Why had so many chosen to forsake their country and serve the aliens? Had patriotism really become such a dirty word? Some had had little choice, some had been brainwashed, but the remainder? They’d chosen to serve the aliens of their own free will. They would all die in the aftermath of the war.

“Only a few hours to go,” Bracken said. “Have you got all the papers?”

“Yes,” the Colonel said, grimly. The SEAL looked calm, but they both knew that they were risking everything on the plan. They’d win — or lose the Earth. Failure would mean the end of any hope of resistance, maybe even the end of the human race itself. With stakes like that, who could blame the collaborators for collaborating? He pushed the thought aside, angrily. It was better to die a free man than live as a slave. “All we have to do now is wait.”

Washington DC

USA, Day 73

Toby hadn’t slept all night. He’d known he should and he’d even considered ordering something to help him sleep, but in the end he’d just lain on his bed and stared at the ceiling. His father would have slept; his dead brother would have slept… but in the end, Toby knew himself to be a lesser man than either of them. He’d told himself that he was serving the country, by serving the President, and yet… he thought less of himself for not having served in the military. It was ironic, in a way; he could never have predicted the path that had led him to the centre of the resistance, yet he was the point failure source for everything. A single mistake and the aliens would have him, and use him as their tool to uncover the resistance and destroy it.