Christopher Nuttall - The Trafalgar Gambit

She broke off, bitterly. “We went skinny-dipping,” she admitted. “It was Ira’s idea.”

“I’m sure it was,” Henry said. “And then?”

“We saw this creature rise out of the water,” Jill said. “It was one of them” — she waved a hand to indicate the aliens — “but we didn’t know it at the time. We thought it might be a dangerous creature. I ran to get the gun and shot it. It fell back into the water and vanished.”

She rubbed her eyes with her bare hands. “They didn’t believe us in the colony,” she said. “There hadn’t been any traces of higher life forms on Heinlein, none at all. They didn’t believe us until the aliens arrived and attacked in force.”

Henry cursed under his breath. The aliens settled the seabed first and then moved onto the surface, if all the projections and observations were correct. Humans, meanwhile, settled the land and rarely paid any attention to what was lurking under the waves. It was quite possible, he decided, for two separate colony missions to occupy the same world, without ever realising the other one was there. If they’d both checked for other life forms and found nothing, would they even bother to check again?

“And it started there,” he mused. “They must have been as astonished as you.”

“I don’t know,” Jill said. “I hid when they attacked; my father fought desperately to protect the colony. But they overwhelmed the defences and took the survivors prisoner. They just… took me away from the other captives one day and sent me here. I haven’t seen any other humans since then.”

Henry considered it. “What do they want from you?”

“They just ask questions and try to master English,” Jill said. She made a face. “I was not a very good teacher.”

“I don’t think English is an easy language for them to learn,” Henry said. How many of humanity’s words were bound up in unspoken assumptions that simply didn’t apply to the aliens? “But you did very well.”

He looked down at his hands, thinking hard. The war was an accident. The whole war, which had killed hundreds of thousands of people and presumably aliens, was an accident, the result of a disastrous First Contact. And yet… how could he get back to Earth to report to his superiors? And even if he did…

They could have talked with us at any moment, he thought, bitterly. God knows Earth would have happily disowned the colonists if it would have prevented a war. Instead, they started to plan for a war that would have crushed us within months, if the Old Lady hadn’t remained intact. They took a minor incident and turned it into a pretext for all-out war.

“The war hasn’t been going well,” he said, slowly. “How long have you been here?”

“I don’t know,” Jill said. “I used to count my… well, you know — but the aliens accidentally destroyed my markers and I lost count. Several months, at least.”

Years , Henry thought. They would have needed time to prepare their weapons and tactics to launch the invasion .

He looked up at the greenish light filtering down from the ceiling. It was the same as it was yesterday and the day before yesterday. The food was the same, the water was always bland and completely tasteless, there was next to nothing to do… it was easy to lose track of just how long he’d stayed in the cell. His hair might not have grown out long enough to suggest he’d been imprisoned for months, but it was still longer than it had been.

Jill caught his arm. “There’s a war on?”

“They attacked Vera Cruz nearly a year ago,” Henry said. he wasn’t sure of the precise timing. “Then they stabbed inwards and advanced on Earth, taking New Russia and several smaller colonies at the same time. We stopped them, then launched a deep-strike raid on the alien colonies. I was on that raid…”

He shrugged. “I don’t know what happened next,” he said, “but I do know some aliens tried to communicate with the fleet.”

Jill stared. “They did?”

Henry nodded, sourly. Humanity’s First Contact protocols had obviously failed, although if the aliens were in a warlike mood they might not have paid attention. But building up a common language was obviously going to take time, time they didn’t have.

“it failed,” he said. “Other aliens stopped them.”

He looked up at her. “Did they try asking you questions about Earth? Anything tactical ?”

“Of course not,” Jill said. “I don’t know anything about Earth.”

“But it suggests they want to learn from you, rather than just suck you dry,” Henry said. The aliens had kept Jill for at least a year, perhaps longer. They could have killed her by now if they’d not thought they had a use for her. “And we have to try to convince them to talk to the rest of humanity. Get some proper diplomats and language experts here, talking to them. We might be able to come to an agreement.”

Jill frowned. “And what if they don’t want to come to an agreement?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said. He thought, briefly, about how the aliens had treated occupied worlds. New Russia had been occupied, but the aliens had largely left the human population alone. But it could have just been a tactical decision to avoid starting the genocide until after the humans were thoroughly defeated. “I just don’t know.”

Ted had known, intellectually, that London had more than its fair share of underground tunnels and bunkers. Ever since the invention of flight, it had been necessary to hide large parts of the government underground, just to ensure some continuity after the country came under attack. Nothing, not even the Troubles or the development of orbital bombardment weaponry had deterred the government from protecting itself.

But he couldn’t help wondering just how safe and secure the network was, after the tidal waves and floods. Parts of the power grid seemed to have failed completely, leaving some of the tunnel sections dark and gloomy, while he could hear the sound of water dripping in the distance. No one had anticipated London being flooded, not since the tidal barriers had been put into service. And no one had anticipated alien bombardment. It was all too easy to imagine a crack in the rock and concrete above their heads widening enough to allow a flood of water into the underground network. They’d be washed away by the water before they realised what was happening or wind up trapped in a subsection of the complex, waiting helplessly for the air to run out.

He shook his head, angrily dismissing the thought, as they passed through a series of secure airlocks and emerged in the basement of Buckingham Palace. It was a secure complex too, he knew, although it had been centuries since the affairs of the nation were directed from any of the Royal Residencies. And now most of the Royal Family had been moved into the countryside, with only the King and Crown Princess remaining in London to share the sufferings of their population. They thought it made good press.

Ted snorted, cynically. The Royal Family would never starve; Buckingham Palace was safe, secure and warm . There would be emergency transport out of London if the aliens returned or rioters threatened the palace itself. Somehow, he doubted that many of their subjects would be impressed.

He looked around, interested, as the equerry led them up a flight of steps and down a long corridor, the walls lined with portraits of monarchs from a bygone age. There were countless display cases everywhere, showing off the presents given to the monarchs by foreign visitors; several of them, he couldn’t help noticing, had been stripped bare, their contents shipped to bunkers well away from the coast. The contents of the palace were a vital part of Britain’s heritage, he knew, something that had to be preserved. But it was hard to take such concerns seriously when he knew millions of people were starving.