The Trojan Horse

Chapter Thirty-Two

Near Mannington, Virginia

USA, Day 61

“So they lied to us right from the start,” the Colonel said. “I suppose I really shouldn’t be surprised.”

He smiled, thinly, at Toby. His youngest son was perched on the end of a comfortable sofa, just close enough to Gillian that it was clear that he admired her. The Colonel allowed himself a bigger smile, even though it risked betraying his awareness of what was going on — they deserved some happiness together. And maybe he’d been wrong about his son for a long time.

“Unless the defector was lying,” Toby said. He shook his head. “No; everything he’s told us fits what facts we have. They’re not friendly at all.”

“I suppose it would be too much to expect an alien race to be monolithic,” the Colonel mused. “They would have their own factions and nations, ideals and religions — I wonder what kind of religion they have. Maybe they worship their Emperors rather than a single omnipresent God.”

He pushed the thought aside. “How many others know about this?”

“Hardly anyone,” Toby admitted. “Given the dangers of them deciding to… convert me, I’ve ordered the alien defector to be moved to another location. I won’t see him in person again until this is all over, and trusted men are watching to ensure that I haven’t become a pod person. If they do…”

The Colonel shivered. He’d called his son a betrayer and a traitor when Toby had gone to Washington, hot words spoken in anger. But now… the aliens could turn Toby into their slave, their devoted servant… and everything Toby knew would become theirs. And what would happen to the resistance then? Toby knew too much to be allowed to fall into enemy hands, but he was also their only window inside the White House. Without Toby, they would have to rely on lower levels… and many of them had become pod people. What remained of the federal law enforcement system was in chaos.

Toby looked up. “If they discover that I have been converted, they have orders to shoot me,” he said. He sounded reluctant to admit it. If the aliens managed to improve their process, Toby might become a pod person without any outwards signs — or one of his men might believe that he had become a pod person and shoot him down, quite by accident. “I suggest that you start making plans to evacuate the farm.”

“Already done,” the Colonel assured him. He wasn’t going to give Toby any more details, not when he was going to walk back into the lion’s jaws. “How long do you think it will be before McGreevy wakes up and smells the shit?”

Toby hesitated. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Everything is in chaos at the moment. I think she probably knows that she’s nothing more than a figurehead for the aliens right now, but she’s reluctant to admit it. She controls so little now; between the pod people and the desertions, we’re seeing the collapse of Washington’s authority. The aliens may choose to end the farce at a moment’s notice.”

The Colonel scowled. He’d longed for the day when Washington, overburdened by massive economic problems and politicians who needed maps to tell the difference between their asses and elbows, collapsed, leaving him and his survivalists to pick up the pieces. And yet without Washington, there was little else holding the country together. The aliens might very well win by default as the country fragmented, leaving them as the sole remaining authority. It might be what they had in mind.

“I got the impression that the aliens are very much a hierarchical society,” Toby added. “They may have expected us to follow McGreevy after she became President, even though she was working for the aliens. I think they will have been surprised by all the resistance. They may start feeling that they no longer need to keep her, or that flattering her pretensions is no longer worth the effort. I’m sure she’d be less trouble as a pod person.”

The Colonel leaned forward. “Does she have any influence at all?”

“It’s hard to say,” Toby admitted. “I’m not privy to her discussions with the aliens, so I don’t know just what she is saying to them. I do know that the aliens have taken over most of our military bases and have been running highly aggressive patrols around them. The bastards don’t hesitate to call down strikes on anything that even looks dangerous. I think they’re making themselves as unpopular as we did in Iraq.”

“Right,” the Colonel said. “But we still won in Iraq.”

He looked down at his hands for a long moment. “That leaves us with one simple issue,” he added. “How do we get up to the ships?”

“One ship,” Toby said. It had been the most startling piece of information from the alien defector, the piece of information that had caused him to wonder if they were being hoaxed. The aliens had left their homeworld with a formidable fleet, but only one warship had survived the wormhole’s implosion to escape back into normal space. No wonder the aliens had been reluctant to allow humans to board and investigate their ships. They had seventeen ships, yet only one of them was armed. The remainder were freighters and troop transports. “If we could get onboard that ship…”

“But they don’t let anyone — anyone human — board their ships,” the Colonel said. If there was a single point failure source in the entire alien fleet, it was their warship. But there was nothing human that could reach high orbit, let alone shoot down an alien starship. He considered, just for a moment, a scheme to build an Orion spacecraft before dismissing it as worthless. There was no way it could be built without alerting the aliens. “Do you think we could find other… Pacifists?”

“Perhaps,” Toby said. He didn’t hold out much hope. Very few aliens talked to humans and he suspected that those who did were trained and authorised to do so. The other Pacifists might be able to make contact, or they might be terrified of being detected and remain in hiding. He doubted that the High Lord would be very kind to any Pacifist discovered onboard his fleet, not after what they’d done. An entire fleet wrecked and stranded thousands of light years from home. No human resistance force had ever pulled off a comparable feat. “We’d have to take an alien shuttle…”

“We’d have to force them to get their people down on the surface first,” the Colonel said. He looked over at Gillian. “Didn’t you manage to get into the alien system?”

“We’re still analysing it,” Gillian admitted. “The Snakes hacked into our internet through the secure military satellites in orbit. Quite clever of them, in a way; once they were inside, they could go anywhere and their computers could crack any secure database. Of course, it opened a path for us to hack them back, but we’re still working on making sense of how their computers work. On one hand, they’re actually more intuitive than anything we’ve designed for ourselves; on the other hand, whoever programmed them was programming for really stupid people. The interface appears to be simplistic to the point of absurdity. It might just be worse than Microsoft…”

“Or maybe they want it to be secure,” the Colonel said. “I bet you that they don’t teach their children anything about computers, unless they have a pressing need to know. Just like a woman driver knowing nothing about how a car actually works — most of the time, she doesn’t need to know how a car works to drive. But when she has a breakdown, she’s in deep trouble.”

Gillian smiled. “It has been my observation that many male soldiers don’t know the first thing about computers either,” she said, sweetly. “Do you know how often I’ve been able to break into secure databases because someone set their password as PASSWORD?”

Toby chuckled and tried to hide it. “We’ll find a way in,” the Colonel said. He couldn’t share any more with Toby, not when there was a chance he could wind up serving the aliens. “Why don’t you two youngsters go for a walk? The days are drawing in and it will soon be dark.”

If Toby resented being excluded, he didn’t show it. But then, he’d been the one to raise concerns about the possibility of being turned into a pod person, someone enslaved to the aliens. He stood up and Gillian followed him, slipping her hand into his as they left the room. The Colonel allowed himself a smile as the door closed behind them, and then he stood up. Bob Packman was waiting in the next room.

“You heard all of that,” the Colonel said, without bothering with any preamble. “What do you think?”

The former CIA analyst frowned. “It’s either true, in which case we will get a single shot at beating the bastards, or it’s the neatest lie any defector has ever told us,” he said. “Personally, I’m inclined to believe that it’s the truth. I cannot imagine anything that the aliens stand to gain by telling us such a lie.”

“Are you sure?” The Colonel pressed. “What if they’re lying to us?”

“I don’t see what they gain from it,” Packman said. “They lied to us about the Galactic Federation to get us to let down our guard. That makes perfect sense. Everything they did was concentrated on weakening us until they could land on Earth and take over without much resistance. They took control of the military — what was left of it — and started taking guns from the local population. And they took control of the media and bombarded us with propaganda about how they came in peace. But what do they stand to gain by convincing us that they’re weaker than we believed?”

“They’d bring us out into the open,” the Colonel said, slowly.

“They don’t gain from that,” Packman said. “They don’t need to provoke us into doing anything else, do they?”

The Colonel couldn’t disagree. “Our first priority has to be to get onto one of their shuttles and get it up into space,” he said. “I think we need to talk to the General.”

“I already have one idea,” Packman said. “I may just require Toby to risk his position a little. Actually, maybe a great deal. He’s the only one in place.”

“I know,” the Colonel said.

There was nothing else to say.

Once, as a child, Toby had stood in the small orchard of apple trees and picked the fruit from the branches before they were ripe. His father hadn’t been pleased with him and had made many sardonic comments when the young Toby had complained of a stomach ache. Now, standing with Gillian under the stars, he felt the same sensation of unease. The night sky was no longer safe for humanity. High above, a winking light signified the presence of one of the alien ships, gazing down with lofty dispassion on the darkened continent. They could come down and strike at any moment and they knew it. They ruled the night.

He hadn’t let go of Gillian’s hand, although he wasn’t quite sure how he’d come to hold it. She’d been living with his father, giving her ample opportunity to learn about Toby’s childhood — if she were interested. Other men seemed to be able to pick out and seduce girls with an ease Toby could only envy, a feeling only partly migrated by the awareness that everyone else had the same problem. The grass was always greener on the other side of the hill. But then, Gillian had the same problem as he did. Neither of them knew what to say.

“I’m sorry,” Toby said, finally. “I didn’t mean to have to send you out here.”

“Better than having me turned into one of the pod people,” Gillian said. Fort Meade had been overrun by pod people a day after Tehran had been hit. Luckily, most of the staff and records had been moved to concealed locations, but it was still a nightmarish blow against the federal government — and humanity’s freedom. Inch by inch, the noose was tightening around humanity’s collective neck. “I wish there was something we could do for them.”

Toby nodded. The alien defector had said that the pod people couldn’t be freed, but he intended to try anyway. If they found a way to liberate the pod people from their shackles, they could run riot in the alien rear — or make the aliens distrustful of all pod people. The aliens had limits to their manpower; forcing them to rely more on their own people would drain their strength. Knowing that the aliens couldn’t risk destroying Earth’s technology base — if they ever wanted to see home again — made it easier for the resistance to plot, but if the aliens realised that it was hopeless they were likely to blow up the planet and call it a draw. Or go into suspended animation and wait for their Empire’s slow expansion to reach Earth. The defector had warned that even if humanity beat the High Lord, they would still have to worry about the Emperor and his Empire. Toby wasn’t so concerned. If his figures were correct, there would be hundreds of years until the Empire stumbled over Earth, long enough to develop a technological base that would dwarf anything the Snakes possessed. And then there would be revenge for the dead, and those brainwashed by the aliens.

He pushed the thought aside and looked up at her. “I wish things were different,” he admitted. They had somehow never gotten close to consummating their relationship — if it was a relationship. It galled Toby that he could ride the political winds, even predict them to some extent, and yet not understand the feminine mind. Why couldn’t they all be guys with tits? “Washington doesn’t feel like itself any longer.”

The thought was chilling. There was a heavy police and military presence on the streets, putting down riots with heavy brutality. The Witnesses — who had welcomed the aliens — were being lynched in the streets. After Tehran, only the most determined — and deluded — of true believers still believed in the promises from the aliens. There was no way of hiding what they’d done, and what was being done in their name. And someone had been taking shots at the White House. Toby was only surprised that the uncoordinated resistance hadn’t succeeded in killing more aliens, or collaborators. Perhaps he ought to be relieved. It would be quite easy for someone to take him for a collaborator.

“They’re taking control of the cities,” Gillian agreed. “They’ve been studying us for years. They knew exactly how to seduce us, how to take control… they’re going to rape the entire planet. Why couldn’t we have met them when we had the whip hand?”

Toby shrugged, awkwardly. “I have to go back to Washington tomorrow,” he said. It had been hard enough to get permission to sneak away for a night — and if anyone checked on where he was supposed to be going, the game would be thoroughly blown. His father would have to leave the farm just after Toby had departed, leaving only an unreliable human chain of messengers between them. If only they could trust the internet for anything more than a handful of coded phases. Gillian had done her best, but the alien computers were simply too powerful, capable of cracking any human code within hours at most. “I won’t see you again for a long time, if ever.”

“I know,” Gillian said. Suddenly, they were very close together. “I wish… I think…”

Their lips met. Toby had kissed before — he might not have been Don Juan, but he’d had other girls — but it felt different this time, almost electric. Perhaps it was love, part of his mind wondered, or perhaps it was just the awareness that there might not ever be another time. His lips pressed against hers with increasing desperation, feeling the sudden pressure of her body against his. He felt her hands reaching around to hold him, while he stroked her back as the kiss grew deeper. It was suddenly extremely difficult to undress without tearing something, or everything. She felt warm, perfect in his arms.

And then there was nothing left, but her.

The Colonel noticed the change in them the following morning, as Susan served them all bacon and eggs before Toby left. They didn’t know it, but the change in their relationship was obvious to someone with enough understanding of human body language. A blind man could have realised that they were now together. They couldn’t seem to let go of one another, or avoid blushing every time their eyes met. The Colonel pretended he hadn’t seen, even though part of him was trying to disapprove. He told that part of him to shut up. It wasn’t as if he’d been celibate before meeting Toby’s mother. Mary would have smacked him one for daring to even think of breaking up their happiness.

After breakfast, he found a quiet moment to exchange a few words with Toby in private. “You’ve done well,” he said, as soon as they were alone. “I wish I’d had a chance to get to know you better.”

“I understand,” Toby said. Perhaps, if the aliens hadn’t come, they would have remained at loggerheads. As it was, they had had a chance to rebuild their relationship. What more could any father ask for, at the end? They might never have another chance to try. “And thank you for everything.”

The Colonel smiled. “Just make sure that that bitch who sold us out doesn’t get to live and we’ll be even,” he said. They’d discussed the plan over breakfast. It would be chancy — and it all depended upon weak links. Maybe that was a strength, the Colonel told himself. No one would expect it. “And then we can build a new country after the aliens have been defeated.”