Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

His escort marched him up to one of the alien buildings and into a network of corridors that looked large enough to hold hundreds of aliens at once. The smell was all around him, a scent that reminded him of mucking out a barn on his grandfather’s estate. He’d never realised that the aliens smelled before, but then he’d never been in a building that had housed so many of them at one time. Human buildings probably smelled rank to them too.

He shuddered as they pulled him through a door and into an office. The aliens couldn’t have been very happy with the recent riots in London, or the fact that part of the city had become a no-go area for the police. Their system for controlling the city — and the human population — was breaking down sharply. God alone knew how they planned to respond. He looked up at the oversized desk and saw one of the aliens crouching behind it. They didn’t seem to need chairs, unlike humanity. Or perhaps it was a way to tell him that he wasn’t important to them any longer.

“Your people have proved most disruptive,” the alien said. Was it the one he normally dealt with, or was it another one? There was no way to easily tell them apart. “We are not pleased. We will be launching sweeps to catch human insurgents and we expect you and your people to cooperate fully with us. Failure to cooperate will have the most disastrous consequences.”

Alan didn’t need to be a politician to realise that that was a threat. “I will be honoured to cooperate,” he said, quickly. “Perhaps if you could outline what you wish us to do…”

“We will carry out the sweeps without your assistance,” the alien informed him. “We wish you to round up a number of humans and their families. We have a use for them.”

“But of course,” Alan said. There was no point in refusing now. The aliens would simply kill him and move on to another collaborator. “Might I enquire as to the purpose you have in mind for them…?”

“You will do as you are told,” the alien said, flatly. “If you are incapable of carrying out your orders, we will find someone who is more capable.”

Alan hesitated. If he started rounding people up without explanation, there would be resistance. People would start thinking that the aliens intended to eat them or something equally stupid, which would naturally provoke more resistance. And then his police force, already demoralised, would find itself unable to proceed further. But how could he explain that to the aliens?

“I will carry out your orders,” he said, finally. “I await your command.”

Near Dereham

United Kingdom, Day 32

Alex lay on her belly and considered the town below her. The aliens had arrived in force, coming up at Dereham from Norwich and surrounding the town before anyone quite realised that they were there. Dereham had been ignored by the aliens after the population had been registered, leaving the people to try to get on with their own lives in a world turned upside down, perhaps even to pretend that the world hadn’t really changed. Their delusion, if they’d indulged themselves, had come to an end. The town was surrounded and the aliens were moving in.

“We can’t just stay here and do nothing,” Henry hissed. He was too young — but then, there had been younger soldiers fighting and dying in Afghanistan. “What are they going to do to the people down there?”

Alex shrugged. The aliens had been alarmingly active over the last few days, sweeping through parts of the countryside without anything that looked like a clear plan of action. Alex’s best guess was that they were looking for insurgents — the internet noted hundreds of attacks carried out against the aliens — but she wasn’t sure why they had returned to Dereham, or why they hadn’t attempted to track her down. Perhaps they were following a doctrine formed on another world. Or perhaps they believed that there was a centre of resistance in the town and they intended to destroy it. There was no way to know.

“We can’t do anything, but get ourselves killed if we go charging into the town,” she hissed back. They’d carried out three strikes at the aliens so far, but she’d insisted on being very careful. If the aliens had decided to sweep through the area for insurgents, it was possible that they’d catch someone who wasn’t registered or uncover an arms dump. Either one would be disastrous. “All we can really do is hope and pray that they don’t find anything that justifies a massacre.”

The images from London had been broadcast over the BBC. Alex had watched in horror as hundreds — perhaps thousands — of humans had been shredded by alien guns. The entire country had seen the bloody suppression of a riot, galvanising resistance to the alien occupation. If the internet was to be believed, there had been hundreds of strikes against the aliens over the last few days. It certainly explained why the aliens were being so determined to sweep for insurgents. Anything was better than waiting to be hit, hoping that superior firepower would allow them to slaughter anyone foolish enough to attack their positions.

There were upwards of 15’000 people in Dereham. It looked as if the aliens were systematically pulling them out of their homes and ordering them to gather in the roads, waiting for their fate to be decided. The aliens were ransacking the buildings, searching for weapons and anything else that might imply a link to the resistance. Alex could see a handful of policemen looking uncomfortable as the searches continued, unsure of just what they were feeling. Some policemen had been pushed into collaboration, no doubt about that, but others had been willing to serve the aliens without threats. It was hard to blame someone who served because his family was at risk, yet how could they tell the difference between that and a man who was serving the aliens for personal gain? Some of the rumours on the internet were shocking.

“Come on,” she hissed. “We can’t stay here.”

It had taken nearly two hours to walk cross-country to Dereham and they’d arrived just in time to see the aliens establish themselves in the area. Alex had no illusions about what they would do once they’d secured the town; they’d sweep out, probably in the direction of Norwich. They had a major presence in that town and given enough time, they could probably safeguard the roads as well. A few of Alex’s allies had been placing IEDs in the area, but that had its own dangers. The last thing they wanted to do was accidentally catch a farmer with an IED.

She scowled as they made their way across a field, which had recently been planted with an alien crop. One of the stranger points about British farming before the invasion had been that the government had paid a number of farmers to leave their fields lying fallow, rather than growing crops. It had been cheaper, apparently, to bring in food from overseas, which had worked perfectly until the country had been cut off from the rest of the world by the aliens. The aliens, on the other hand, had made a list of every farmer with fallow fields and ordered them to start growing seeds they’d provided. They hadn’t gone into details, but they seemed to believe that the crop would be grown before winter, allowing it to be harvested and a second crop planted after the winter snows had faded away. Alex wasn’t too surprised to see that they were planting crops from their world, but Smith had been furious. Adding something new to the ecology could cause chaos across the entire country.

“It was bad enough when they started planting those damn genetically-modified crops,” he’d said, holding up one of the alien seeds. It hadn’t looked very alien, but someone down in the town had looked at it through a microscope and confirmed that it bore no resemblance to something from Earth. “These things are likely to spread further and there won’t be anything we can do about it.”