The Yeomen of England (Posleen in England)

Ten Downing Street

London, United Kingdom

26^th March 2007
A darkness had fallen over the land, the Prime Minister knew, both a natural one and an unnatural one. On the map, the region of land held by the Posleen glowed an evil red, a giant red eye glaring at him. From Bath to Manchester, the Posleen held sway, consolidating their hold on the land.
“Wales is holding out for the moment,” General Mathews said grimly. “The Sub-Urbs there are holding; we put a lot of weapons into there and so far they’ve thrown back the attacking Posleen. There are skirmishes all along the border. The problem, however, is Manchester.”
He changed the display. “This is the best picture we have,” he said. The Prime Minister wondered if it was the most optimistic, rather than the most detailed. “The Posleen have failed to take the city, but they’re settling in for a siege.”
“Which is a change in their usual procedure,” Anderson injected. “They must have a clever God King in charge, one of those who can learn from experience.”
“Even the normal Posleen can learn from experience,” the Prime Minister said. “How many people are trapped inside the city?”
“It’s impossible to say,” Mathews said. “The best estimate is upwards of several hundred thousand civilians, perhaps way more. We do know that nearly two hundred thousand soldiers are caught within the city, along with several thousand killed or seriously wounded when the Posleen closed the circle.”
The Prime Minister shuddered. “All right,” he said finally. “What do you want to do about it?”
“The population of Manchester is the largest population caught within the Posleen-occupied territory and the only one we can hope to extract,” General Mathews said. The Prime Minister nodded; Birmingham had made its last transmission earlier in the day. Bath and Cardiff were both bleeding heavily. “I want to send in the ACS.”
The Prime Minister steepled his fingers. “I was under the impression that the ACS would be employed in a defensive role,” he said. “You’re talking about laying on at attack with inadequate preparation.”
“We know that the Posleen can be beaten,” Mathews said. “Ireland shows that we can defeat a landing if we act quickly, and the Posleen seem to be concentrating on Manchester. It’s very un-Posleen-like behaviour, which is odd.”
“I think they want the food,” Anderson said. “We did a pretty good job of dealing with the…food supplies in other cities. Perhaps they’re getting hungry.”
“We should be so lucky,” the Prime Minister said. “Go on then, how do you plan to handle it?”
“We have been moving forces to the north of Manchester, intended to cover the refugees when they began to escape,” General Mathews said. “Reinforced by the ACS units, which will take the point, and the 3^rd Armoured Regiment, which has the modified anti-lander tanks, they will move from Oldham to the M60, which seems to be serving as the border.
“As they’re moving, the SAS teams will call in fire support for them, targeting the Posleen in the region,” he continued. “While the main focus of the attack will be the Oldham-Manchester axis, we’ll be hitting Posleen targets all around Manchester, trying to distract them. In fact, we’ll be pounding them harder in the direction of Liverpool, which is still holding out.
“Once the attacking force has punched its way through the Posleen, we will open the roads and cover the refugees once they flee, withdrawing as completely as we can from Manchester. The Posleen will take the city, but they’ll take rubble.”
“We could launch a nuclear strike,” Anderson suggested diffidently.
“I will not condone the use of such weapons on British soil,” the Prime Minister said flatly. He picked up his phone. “Shelia, can you call Sir Robert?”
He put down the phone. “With some slight modifications, we might be really able to stick it to the Posleen.”
It was Anderson who caught on first. “You’re going to give Hammond some real false information,” he said. He smiled. “Telling the Posleen that they’re going to be attacked from Liverpool?”
“Correct,” the Prime Minister said. He looked up for a moment at the portrait of Britain’s first – and, so far, the only – female Prime Minister. She would have approved, he felt; Lady Thatcher was known for taking hard decisions. He smiled. “That, General, is exactly what we’re going to do.”
Mathews coughed. “I would like to see the data myself first,” he said. “It might contain information that might be useful to the Posleen anyway.”
The Prime Minister nodded. “Yes,” he said. “We’ll do that first, I think.”
***

Margent Hammond was petrified. The arrival of the Posleen had shocked her the first time, but to see Manchester and Birmingham laid waste was horrifying. She’d known people in Birmingham, who now were feeding the Posleen.

“I made a mistake,” she said bitterly. There was no one to hear her in her private office. “I should have refused to see Griffin when he turned up, the bastard.”
She cursed. Her position as head of the ‘semi-loyal opposition,’ the party of MPs who opposed the war, made her unable to propose measures for the defence of Britain, such as the chilling ‘Bouncing Barbie’ weapons the Americans had accidentally invented. She’d wanted the weapons, but politics had demanded that she – unsuccessfully, thank God – oppose their introduction, along with other weapons that the Darhel had wanted removed.
They don’t like it when we improvise, she knew grimly, and understood it to be the truth. The Darhel had been undisputed masters of their section of the galaxy for so long that they no longer had the ability to react well to surprises. The Posleen Invasion had come as a shock to them, but they no longer had the capability to fight them – not for long enough to be effective. The Darhel didn’t even dare deploy AI warriors, robotic killing machines, after one group had gotten out of control, fortunately close enough to the Posleen not to survive the experience.
She felt like crying. The Darhel had insisted on using her as their tool, and even knowing that her own people were making use of everything she told them, everything she did for the Darhel, didn’t make the sensation of betraying her own people any easier to bear.
And thank God that we don’t have a big leftist party, she thought, and chuckled bitterly at the irony. In Germany and France, the massive Socialist and Green parties had fallen almost completely under Darhel control; some through bribery, and some through radicalism. The Darhel agent hadn’t even bothered to try to conceal it from her, reminding her of Darhel power and sophistication.
She gazed down again at the details that – officially – came from a source in the Ministry of Defence. There was a major counter-attack being laid on, one designed to destroy the Posleen forces surrounding Manchester, launching from Liverpool. Unofficially, she knew that it came from MI5, from the small group of officers who were her handlers. The Darhel would take the information and do…what? She had good intelligence sources within the MOD, and she knew that the Posleen had hardly responded to any of the more important titbits within the files she’d passed on.
But then, the Posleen are not very bright, she thought, and then her secretary interrupted her thoughts. “Miss Hammond, Mr Griffin is here for his appointment,” she said.
Hammond took a breath and let it out in one rolling sigh. “Send him in,” she said. She pasted a smile on her face as the Darhel agent, as handsome and anonymous as ever, entered the room. His dark hair was the same rich black as ever; his dark eyes were the same as they had been when they had first met, six years ago.
“A pleasure, as always,” Griffin said. His attitudes to her had changed, however; he was asserting his dominance. If she had been younger, she had no doubt that he would have pressured her into bed with her. Her agents had reported that he had some female company, in the flat the Darhel had supplied for him.
“How is everything, now that the Posleen are back?” Hammond asked. “Have you been offered a place on a ship out of Earth?”
Griffin lifted one elegantly shaped eyebrow. “I have been honoured to serve those I serve for a long time,” he said. “They have agreed to look after my family in exchange for my services.”
“Bought and paid for,” Hammond said. As long as the Darhel needed her, they wouldn’t simply dump her and cut and run. She felt that she could be snide on occasion.
“Like you,” Griffin said. “Your message said that it was urgent.”
“There is a plan afoot to defeat the Posleen,” Hammond said. She cringed perfectly under his gaze. “I thought that you wanted to be informed of any such information.”
“I do indeed,” Griffin said. “May I see the information?”
Hammond passed across a handful of papers. “Why don’t you people use computers all the time?” Griffin demanded, examining them and using his AID to make scanner copies of them, dumping the signal back to the Darhel embassy. “Because you’re stupid primitives, that’s why.”
Hammond was stung. “There are plenty of people who dislike using our computers,” she said, waving a hand around an office for which ‘paperless’ would have been an oxymoron. “Yours are much easier to use, but they still have that…aura of being for techno-geeks and people like that.”
“Really,” Griffin said. “A society will not advance until it is at peace with its technology.”
“Our technology was advancing too fast,” Hammond said. That had been party dogma before the Posleen landed. Queen Victoria’s armies would have been cut to ribbons – and there would have been no microscopic allies to save the day. “We had progressed beyond our ability to control it.”
“Quite right,” Griffin said. “However, my masters will be more than happy to assist humanity to find its place within the galaxy.”
“I’m sure they would be,” Hammond said, sincerely. “What are you going to do with the information that I have found for you?”
Griffin shrugged. “That’s up to my master,” he said. “Now, how about a drink?”
Hammond didn’t react to another of his dominance games. “Certainly,” she said, and if she gritted her teeth, no one noticed.
***

The Darhel Tir studied the information from Griffin with interest, using his best calming mantra to avoid the consequences of thinking too much about war, death and suffering. The idea, so long ago, of storing some human genetic material had proven to be a flawed idea, but who needed it when humans were more than willing to sell their own souls for money? The Darhel understood – and yet, concepts such as ‘honour,’ ‘loyalty,’ and ‘duty’ meant little to them. Life within the Darhel-run Federation was based around rules designed to counter the aggressive impulses that meant certain death – and even included the proper and acceptable way to commit treason!

It was unfortunate, the Tir decided, that there weren’t enough humans with the proper training to assist it, to take the weight of such decisions off his hands – and mind. Some German and French Generals, for reasons that made no sense to the Darhel, had decided to assist the Darhel, but they couldn’t be trusted. Motives like the half-expressed and ill-conceived ideals of some of the Germans could not be trusted, for they could swing against the Darhel at any moment.
The Darhel held himself together by an effort of will, before making the final arrangements. The Posleen Net would show that the humans were planning to attack from Liverpool, the omnipotent Net that the Posleen trusted completely. The Darhel shuddered, on the edge of madness, as he uploaded the information, and then he pushed the AID away, hard.
The Tir shuddered again, before leaving the room. Thousands of humans would die – but, for the Tir, that was the entire point of the exercise. Humans had to remain on their own planet until they were under Darhel control – or the entire Federation would be lost.