Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

Two miles further on, he ran into a second group of military policemen who ordered him to abandon the Range Rover and proceed on foot. The woodlands seemed crammed with human soldiers, including Royal Marines and RAF Regiment personnel, all forced together by circumstances. Chris had fought beside the Royal Marines in Afghanistan and while he thought — naturally — that the soldiers had the advantage, he had to admit that the Royal Marines were tough, professional fighters. The military policemen were sorting them out, sending some further away from Salisbury Plain while holding others to join the defence line. It looked as if someone was in command, thankfully. Perhaps everything he’d seen in London would be useful after all.

But the aliens controlled the high orbitals over Earth. They could bombard the planet into submission, or hammer any human military force foolish enough to show itself openly. How could an insurgency hope to win against such an enemy? God alone knew if they could do more than sting the enemy…

“Down here,” a military policeman said. There was a hatch hidden in the woods, seemingly leading down to nowhere. Given how many other bunkers, bases and supply dumps were scattered around Salisbury Plain, it made sense to think that there was a government bunker hidden there too. “They’ll meet you at the bottom.”

Chris nodded and began to descend down the ladder.

“Are you decent, Prime Minister?”

Gabriel snorted at Butcher’s mock-falsetto tone. He’d slept for several hours and awoke feeling as if he hadn’t slept very long at all, but his watch told a different story. Butcher — who had apparently been assigned as his permanent bodyguard — had pointed him at the shower and told him to take his time. Someone had brought in a spare set of clothes, allowing him to lose the suit and tie he’d worn during the mad rush from London. The military seemed to have maintained its sense of efficiency, he told himself, and wondered how long that would last.

“I think so,” he said, finally. He hadn’t been able to shave and his cheeks felt rough with stubble. “Have we been discovered?”

“I don’t think so,” Butcher said. “But there have apparently been developments. I’ll leave it to the Brigadier to brief you.”

They walked down the concrete corridor and into the conference room. Most of the operators he remembered from last night were missing, their stations shut down and marked for destruction. In fact, the entire bunker complex seemed emptier than he recalled — even though he could hear the sound of people talking in low voices down the corridor. He assumed that they hadn’t been detected — they would have fled the bunker if they had even suspected that the aliens knew where they were — but it was clear that something had changed. The Brigadier, when he made his appearance a moment later followed by a young soldier, looked deeply worried.

“Prime Minister,” he said. “I’m afraid that there have been developments.”

Gabriel listened carefully as the story of the Battle of London came pouring out of the young soldier. Two companies of British soldiers had fought and held the aliens for nearly an hour, before the aliens finally pushed through by brute force. London itself had been damaged in the crossfire, with at least one alien transport crash-landing in Central London. The thought was impossible to grasp — it just wasn’t supposed to happen in Britain. Even the suicide bombers who’d killed far too many civilians on 7/7 hadn’t even dreamed of causing so much pain.

“It gets worse,” the Brigadier added. “I’m afraid that the aliens have found themselves a Petain.”

He tapped a console and the recorded radio message played out, twice. Gabriel found himself listening with growing anger as Alan Beresford — an MP who had been implicated in a dozen scandals, yet nothing quite seemed to stick — recited the alien message to the British population. God alone knew what the public would make of it. They’d be frightened, isolated from the rest of the world, unsure of their place… far too many would simply grasp the straw Beresford was offering them. And the aliens themselves…

If Beresford was to be believed, their social development had not matched their technological development. But then, a case could be made that humanity’s development hadn’t matched its technology either. The aliens… they’d come, they’d seen and they’d conquered, with as little regard for the rights of mankind as Julius Caesar had shown to the barbarians he’d crushed beneath the heels of his legions. It was tempting to believe that Beresford was a liar — Gabriel wouldn’t have believed that the sky was blue if Beresford had said it — but so far everything the aliens had done matched what he’d said. But then… if Nazi Germany had won World War Two, everyone would have been raised to believe that Nazism was right.

“My God,” he said, finally. “What do we do about it?”

The Brigadier scowled. “The last reports have the aliens massing forces here, here and here,” he said, tapping locations on the map. “I believe that they intend to advance westwards within the next few hours and scatter our forces before we can regroup and take the offensive. I’m afraid that we’re going to have to put our emergency plan into operation before too long.”

Gabriel nodded. “What do we have to do?”

“You’re going to a secure location in the north — an old estate that belongs to a family that has been linked with the British Government for centuries,” the Brigadier said. “It was always envisaged as the final resort — and so there haven’t been any mentions of it on our computers or anywhere else. Butcher and his team will escort you there and then take care of you, once you’ve recorded a message for the civilians. You have to tell them that there’s a government still out there fighting…”

“But won’t that encourage them to fight themselves?” Gabriel asked. “Won’t we just be prolonging the agony?”

“I wish I knew,” the Brigadier admitted. “Back when I did a stint at Northwood, I saw some of the contingency plans and scenarios dreamed up by civil servants. They all tended to change depending upon the underlying assumptions, but I think we have to assume that the majority of the civilian population will not resist the invaders. But there’s a fine line between not resisting and outright collaboration and… if they believe that there is a government left out there, fewer people will collaborate. I think that the aliens have to have limits on their manpower. Whatever their FTL drive, shipping millions of troops across interstellar distances cannot be cost-effective.”

“And the fewer collaborators they have, the harder it will be for them to rule Earth,” Gabriel said. The Brigadier nodded. “But what do they want ?”

“If we take that traitorous bastard at his word, they think they have the right to rule everyone too weak to stand up to them,” the Brigadier said. “Or maybe they have some other goal in being here that they’re keeping to themselves — perhaps because they fear we could spite them in some way. Overall… we don’t know what they want.

“The good news is that we managed to make contact with two of our missile boats,” he added. “The aliens hit our submarine bases pretty hard, but we had three of the four boats at sea and two of them have been appraised of the situation. Using them may be tricky with the aliens controlling space, yet we do feel that there are possibilities. We’ve also managed to pull most of the tactical nukes from their storage bunkers and I’ve given orders to conceal them…”

“They are not to be used without my express permission,” Gabriel said, sharply. The thought of nuclear war on British soil was horrifying. “I want you to make that clear to your officers.”