The Yeomen of England (Posleen in England)

Civil Defence Centre

Rusholme, Manchester

25^stth August 2001
Brad hadn’t even known that there was a civil defence infrastructure in Manchester; he’d been born long after the last nuclear drill had been conducted. The Civil Defence Centre he’d been asked to attend had been newly constructed; it was really a building that had been taken over by the Territorial Army. Even only a fortnight after the official announcement, Britain had already begun fuel rationing while the massive oil supplies were filled with oil from the Middle East.
“Thank you all for coming,” the leader said. “For the record, my name is Sergeant Kendrick and I was last in action during the Korean War.”
Brad stared at him. Kendrick was young, almost as young as he was, with a full head of chestnut hair. His body was fit and toned, rather than muscular, but he held himself in a manner he’d seen from other army personnel. He wondered if Sarfraz would carry the same bearing, or if he himself would in a few years.
“Yes, that was a long time ago,” Kendrick said, breaking into his thoughts. “Many of you volunteered to serve the Queen, and I suspect that you have been astonished to be invited here, rather than being ordered to the local regiment, the King’s Regiment.” He smiled. “Perhaps you found it insulting, however, there is a reason for it.” He peered down at them. “We have been giving certain people new leases on life,” he said. “Myself included.
“What that means, from a practical point of view, is that the installations that would normally begin your training are currently working on rejuvenating the old soldiers and bringing them up to speed on the weapons we’ll be using in this conflict. Your training…has been deferred, and yet you wanted to serve your country.”
He smiled. “In this camp, we’re going to cover the basics of evacuating the population, laying down covering fire…and if necessary dying with our backs to the wall. The population has to be preserved, lads, and if you do your job right, many thousands of them will remain alive. Do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” they shouted.
Kendrick scowled at them. “Unless things have changed a lot since my day, you don’t address a sergeant as ‘sir’,” he said. “Only officers are sir; we sergeants work for a living.” He chuckled at his own joke. “You can laugh, you know; I’m not that much of a bastard.”
There were some scattered chuckles. “I won’t lie to you,” Kendrick said. “This is not going to be an easy task. We’re going to be holding drills right in the middle of streets, and the people are going to be very unappreciative of the services until the invasion begins, at which point they’ll be begging you for help. Now” – he pointed a long finger at a girl in the front row – “which way will the enemy come from?”
The girl shivered at his suddenly hard tone. “From the sea, sir,” she said.
“I work for a living,” Kendrick said mildly. His voice hardened. “No, young lady; the enemy can come from anywhere. If they land right on top of us, we’re fucked.”
He pulled at a curtain, exposing a map. “The Posleen can pretty much land where they like,” he said. “There’s a ton of crap about this in the papers we will be expecting you to study, so we won’t go into details.” He grinned evilly. “There will be a test later, lads and lassies.” He tapped a red circle, drawn over the centre of Manchester. “If the Posleen land there, lads, we’re fucked and the only thing to do is take as many of them down with us. Do you know why?”
He pointed a long finger at Brad. “Because they’ll smash us when they land?” He hazarded. “They’ll come down on top of us?”
“Because they’ll spread out and massacre the population before we can get them the hell out of here,” Kendrick bellowed. He thumped the map. “Ten minutes after the Posleen spill out, anyone within this region is D-E-A-D, pronounced dead.” He waited for them to finish gasping in shock. “If they land outside the city, or if they start marching on the city, we have a chance.”
He adjusted the map. A large red arrow moved across the land, pointing directly at Manchester. “The Posleen are five hours away,” he said. “The army cannot stop them. What do we do?”
He glared at a black man in the second row. “Well?”
The man seemed to hesitate. “Get out of there?”
“Get everyone in the city out of there,” Kendrick snapped. He sighed. “If everything goes to plan, most of the population of the city will be out of there. As it won’t go to plan…how do we move people that fast out of the city?”
He looked around, and then his gaze fixed on a young girl. “Umm, they could take the train, or the airport?”
“You think that we can run that many trains, even if the lines remain uncut?” Kendrick asked dryly. “Not a bad thought, but impractical; there won’t be time to do it. As for aircraft, aircraft don’t survive near the Posleen. Full stop.”
“What about cars and buses?” Brad asked, forgetting himself. “Could they not drive out?”
“They’re going to have to,” Kendrick said. “Good thinking, young man.” He tapped the map again. “At the moment, there are only a handful of cars on the road,” he said. “By the time the Posleen come, we expect that there will be fewer and fewer of them, but we will have buses ready to evacuate the civilians.” He suddenly looked very old. “I won’t lie to you,” he said, seeming to forget that he’d said that before. “The odds are very likely that we’ll lose thousands of people, or that we’ll die bravely in their defence.”
He looked at them all. “We’re not the Army,” he said. “Some of you, those who show the most military promise, will go to the Army, but our mission is to help save lives. We will learn how to fight, but that’s a last resort; do you understand?”
“Yes, sir,” they said.
“I’ll let the sir pass, this time,” Kendrick said. “Now, the fun bit first, ladies and gentlemen; the crash course in Urban Terrorism, with which to terrorise some yellow monsters.”