Now, however… the aliens were carefully hacking the remainder of the United States apart. They were targeting everywhere, but one case was particularly bad. They’d picked off a handful of bridges across the Hudson River and virtually cut New England off from New York. The net result was mass starvation, despite careful rationing and an evacuation program that had relocated hundreds of thousands of people. If it continued, the population would soon become so desperate that they would convert to any religion, even Satanism, just to be fed. The report had suggested that defeatism was actually growing in parts of the country, despite the daily reports of atrocities from the Red Zone in Texas and the Middle East.
Worse, almost all of the food coming into the northeast corridor, where nearly two-thirds of the population lived, including Washington, came by truck. The aliens, as they had figured out more of the American system, had started to pick off additional vital bridges and interchanges in Pennsylvania, as well as a handful of trucks, picked almost at random. The cumulative effect, the report suggested, was that vast sections of the population would be facing starvation — and a complete social collapse — fairly soon. The stockpiles of food and supplies were running low… and, worse, there was almost no oil coming in from outside. The US could, and did, pump up some from within its borders, but even so, getting it somewhere was proving difficult…
Worst of all, the alien occupation of the Middle East gave them massive clout with the remainder of the world. Sure, they were fighting an insurgency that made the Iraqi insurgency look like nothing, but they were holding the oil wells and even starting to pump out more oil. There were countries, everywhere, that needed that oil and would be willing to sign an agreement with the devil to get it. Judging from some of the reports and rumours drifting around the world, the Japanese were within days of signing an accord with the aliens, and they would only be the first. The President was surprised that Europe hadn’t gone under already, although the reports from the various embassies suggested that it was just a matter of time. The aliens were learning how to manipulate the human economy… and, in doing so, had caught the entire world in a vice.
The report actually became grimmer when handling the longer-term issues. The American — and thus the global — banking system had effectively collapsed. The restrictions the President and other world leaders had put on it before the aliens arrived had helped to disguise it, but the truth was that thousands of international loans were never going to be paid back, let alone internal loans. The destruction of the satellites had started a chain reaction that had brought down dozens of companies, including some that had seemed invincible, and even that was only the beginning. The American economy was in ruins… and nothing, it seemed, could halt the process.
He scowled and took another sip of his coffee. They were trying, but would anything be enough? The new depression made the Great Depression look like nothing, and yet… people were trying to pull through. There were thousands of men and women being encouraged to go work on the farms — supplies of vital farming equipment had been disrupted as well — and others who had signed up with the army or various recovery projects, but would it be enough. The little patches of America where law and order had been destroyed, or had become the provenance of survivalists or militias, were only disrupting recovery…
The President placed his head in his hands. There seemed to be no way out of the trap, nothing, but surrender… and see what terms the aliens intended to offer the remains of the United States. He doubted that they would be kind.
General Herald — Justin Michael Herald — didn’t fit the popular image of a General, Paul decided, after watching him as the President called the meeting to order. Herald looked more like a slightly underweight version of Dilbert, rather than a hard-charging cigar-chomping soldier, but perhaps that was to be expected. As the foremost expert in biological warfare in America, Herald was the commanding officer of the US Army Chemical and Biological Defence Command, a unit so secretive that even Paul had found it hard to obtain any real data, until the invasion had begun. The prospect, however small, of an alien bio-threat had concentrated a few minds and Herald had been given the task of ensuring that any such threat was neutralised before it became a serious problem.
Paul listened absently as the President ran through the handful of preliminary details. Herald had, apparently, told the Congressional Committee that if there was any trace of a bio-threat from the aliens, it would be serious if it only infected one human before being discovered. He’d been blunt about it, to staffers and congressmen who’d only learned about biological weapons from movies, blunt enough that he had more than his fair share of enemies on the Hill. The prospect had been unlikely, he’d assured them, but if it did happen, it would be disastrous.
“As you know,” Herald began, for the benefit of those who didn’t, “all captured alien bodies were recovered as rapidly as possible, frozen and transported to a variety of centres throughout the country, coordinated with the CDC and a handful of other institutions. The live aliens might have been kept at a separate facility, but we had a strong input into the design of the complex, which was originally intended for possible Typhoid Mary’s. It is impossible to be one hundred percent certain, but I can now state that it is probably impossible for any of their diseases to make the leap into humanity and cause an epidemic.”
The President, who was hearing that for the first time, frowned. “How certain are you of that?”
“It is difficult to be absolutely sure,” Herald admitted. “However, it seems that the aliens lived in a fairly closed environment, one where diseases were generally isolated and controlled, if not wiped out, and the net result is that our tormentors are a fairly healthy lot. Regardless, their internal biology is very different from ours and something intended to attack their systems would probably be unable to get a hold on ours. We have attempted to actually cross-transfer cells from their bodies” — and, Paul knew, a series of experiments that would sicken anyone who heard about them cold — “and so far we have had absolutely no success.”
“And so they cannot affect us,” Senator Ovitz snapped. The Texan eyed the President and then Herald as if they were personally responsible for everything that had happened to Texas. Senator Ovitz had more power than an average Senator… and, with his state under occupation, had been the loudest voice demanding action. “Can we affect them?”
Herald didn’t seem to notice the tone. “The results suggest that any War of the Worlds scenario is unlikely,” he said. “We conducted a series of tests on live alien cells, taken from the captives, and again, nothing we have seems to take hold.”
“But… damn it all,” Senator Ovitz thundered. “You’re supposed to be constructing new viruses to use against the enemies of the United States! Can’t you come up with something that can infect the aliens?”
There was a brief outburst of chatter from around the table, which ended when the President lifted a hand. “The brief of my department,” Herald informed Senator Ovitz, in a frosty tone, “is to develop defences against biological attack. At times, the difference between a defence capability and an attack capability is actually almost non-existent. In order to discover how best to prevent the spread of bio-weapons, we need to study the diseases directly, which means that to all intents and purposes, we have an attack capability.”
He peered at Senator Ovitz through his spectacles. “Biological warfare is not straightforward,” he continued. “Despite the belief of Hollywood scriptwriters, it is very difficult to come up with the required mixture of lethality and timing that are the hallmark of a successful bio-weapon. The more… unpleasant a disease is, the shorter the timescale between infection, symptoms and death. Ebola, to use only one example from the movies, has a tendency to show symptoms too quickly. The victim seeks medical help, whereupon the disease is recognised and countermeasures begun.”