Christopher Nuttall - Their Darkest Hour

The alien said nothing.

“Oh, don’t give me that,” Gavin snapped, angrily. “We know that you have captured thousands of British and American military personnel — and we assume you’ve done the same everywhere you’ve landed. What are you doing with them?”

He stared up at the alien’s dark eyes. “We need to know,” he said, quietly. “Where are our soldiers?”

“They have been taken off-world,” the alien said, finally. His bulk seemed to quiver, just for a second. “They will serve the State on the disputed worlds. As subjects of the State, it is their duty to serve as the State decrees. They will fight for the State or die.”

Gavin blinked in surprise. “You’re expecting them to fight for you?”

“Of course,” the alien said. “Their world is in our claws. We own your planet now and your people exist to serve the State. Your military personnel will be expected to take the disputed world or lose the right to return to their homeworld.”

“I see,” Gavin said. “And most of them will die in service to the State?”

“To die in the service of the State is a great thing,” the alien said. Gavin stared down at the translator, convinced that there had to be an error. How could the aliens have developed such a society — and at the same time, developed FTL drives that had allowed them to spread out into interstellar space? For all he knew, someone had given the aliens FTL technology — or someone had landed on their homeworld and they’d captured their starship.

But then, what would have happened if Hitler had won World War Two? There would have been a fascist state, with children indoctrinated into believing Hitler’s warped racial theories from birth — theories that would have been ‘proven’ by the Nazi victory. How long would it be before someone decided to question the fascist state’s nature? And if they’d all been brought up to believe that genocide was acceptable in the name of the state, who among them would even question?

A few years ago, he’d read a book about the American South — and how slavery had been an integral part of society. They’d known that blacks were inferior to whites, which had played a large part in keeping society ordered, rather than have the poorer whites realise just how badly they were being screwed by their social superiors. And generations of children had been raised to believe that blacks were inferior… it had taken generations and a civil war to start the long task of changing their minds, and the scars were still present when the Leathernecks had invaded Earth. How long would it be before some Leatherneck version of William Wilberforce raised his voice to challenge the ruling party?

“One final question,” he said, finally. “How can we get you off our world?”

The alien seemed almost amused by the question. “You can’t,” he said. “Earth belongs to the State.”

“We have been bouncing questions off him for some hours,” the intelligence officer reported. She was a slight woman, barely strong enough to get through the army’s basic training before being streamlined into intelligence. “I’m afraid that most of what he told you, General, seems to fit in with what else we know about them. They came, they saw and they conquered Earth.”

She tapped her laptop and the display changed. “We now know more about how they’re organised,” she continued. “At the time, there’s a Command Triad; three officers, one from the Land Forces, one from the Space Forces and one from their intelligence service. Below them, there are Land Force Commanders who serve as the principle officers on the ground — we have one assigned to Britain, there are several assigned to the United States and at least three assigned to Europe. Below them ” — she tapped the laptop again — “there are a number of units assigned to the various Land Force Commanders. Apparently, we’ve been bleeding them pretty hard and they’ve had to shift units around fairly regularly on fireman drills.”

Gavin smiled, despite his tiredness. Earth might be tiny by interstellar standards, but she was still a pretty big planet and most of the regional theatres were separated by large bodies of water. The aliens might have upwards of two million soldiers in their conquest force, yet it was nowhere enough to hold down the entire planet. But they didn’t really need to hold down the entire world. The fighting in the Middle East, the chaos sweeping through Africa, the mass slaughters in the Balkans and Central Asia — the humans were still fighting each other, even when there was a more dangerous threat in orbit. It might not have been that important — the aliens were perfectly capable of bombarding parts of the planet they didn’t need into submission — but it would have been nice to think that humanity could unite against a common foe.

Linux looked up from where he’d been sitting. “We’re fairly sure that we could take their command network down for some time,” he said. Gavin nodded, remembering when it had been first proposed. “But it would only work once. After that, they would start isolating their systems and making it impossible to take them down again.”

Gavin snorted. “I still don’t understand why they even offered us the chance to do it once.”

Linux smirked. “How many people really know what happens inside a computer?” He asked, clearly remembering his pre-military days. “Every time a person’s identity is stolen by a hacker, it happens because someone was careless or ignorant and left the front door to their computer wide open. People use the same passwords for different computers, even though they should know better. Do you know how I broke into the Pentagon’s computers?”

His smile grew wider. “One of their officers used the same password for accessing their computers as he did for buying stuff on Amazon,” he explained. “I cracked one password and then I had access to all of his Pentagon files. And that was someone who really should have known better. I’d be surprised if the alien troopers know anything about what happens inside a computer. They certainly don’t seem to be interested in telling them anything more than they need to know.”

“Maybe we should hold off for a few years and let them absorb our computer systems,” Gavin mused. “And then we could take down their entire system at one fell swoop.”

“Unless they’re complete idiots, they will take precautions,” Linux pointed out. “I would — if I had human specialists working for me.”

Gavin shrugged. “And so we go back to the old problem,” he said. “The aliens are in a position to bombard us into submission. Even if we take out their forces on the ground, we would still be knocked back down and forced to surrender.”

“Maybe we could find a way to contact their enemies,” Linux said. “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

Gavin had been giving that some thought. “I don’t see how,” he admitted, finally. “Unless we can build an FTL communicator…”

“They don’t have one,” Linux said.

The door burst open as one of the operators ran into the room. “Sir,” he said, “there’s an important broadcast on the BBC. You have to see it!”

Gavin followed him back upstairs, leaving a pair of soldiers behind to keep an eye on the alien. The broadcast was already repeating when he reached the dining room, where two of the staff had been monitoring the BBC. He was mildly surprised that the aliens hadn’t bothered to put out their own version of the attack on the detention camp, but their propaganda efforts seemed feeble, almost uninspired. Their collaborators weren’t quite working as hard as they should.

Alan Beresford’s face appeared on the screen as the message started again. “I have been informed that the bitter-enders have taken one of our alien friends captive,” he said. The collaborator-in-chief sounded as if he sincerely believed every word he said, although that was a necessary skill for a politician. “They have informed me that they no longer intend to allow the bitter-enders to frustrate Earth’s admission to the galactic state. Therefore, if this captive is not released, a large number of humans will die.”