The Yeomen of England (Posleen in England)

Chapter Twenty-Five: Counting the Cost

Ten Downing Street

London, United Kingdom

28^th March 2007
Dawn rose over London, bringing clouds of rain and hail with it, descending upon a city that was preparing for a siege. The Prime Minister, who knew more than most about the power of the Posleen, could only hope that the defences would be enough, when the Posleen decided to test them in person. He stared out of the window, watching the defenders continue their building, and wondered.
Behind him, the members of the War Cabinet took their places in the room, sitting around the table. In theory, Parliament was still in session, but with its members scattered around the country; a third in Edinburgh, a third in London, and a third in the Orkneys, holding a debate was…tricky. The Scottish Parliament, that overrated institution, had been rather unhappy about moving the Shadow Parliament to Edinburgh, but the BBC recordings of the Battle of Manchester, as well as the slaughter in Birmingham, had proven very convincing.
How do we win this war without losing our democracy? The Prime Minister asked. It was no longer 1940, when someone – Churchill – could be trusted with near-total power. Even with the Civil Defence Corps and the police working hard, there were still problems when people objected to government dictation. Parliament held a supervisory role – and it had forbidden the use of nuclear weapons unless all was lost.
The Prime Minister shivered. He’d forced himself to watch the videos, from desperate refugees from Manchester, to the slaughterhouses the Posleen had created. The long-range guns had tried their best to hammer the Posleen feeding zones, but they’d failed; the Posleen were growing better at chasing humans who were sneaking around their encampments.
And if all is lost? He asked himself. He knew what had been planned for that, just like he and a handful of others had conspired to do in Ireland. The Irish had shattered the Posleen landing force, defeating them before the Posleen could make Irish Stew out of them, and it had come at a price. If they ever learnt that the antimatter explosion hadn’t been an accident…
The Prime Minister shook his head. If the worst happened, the…incident in Ireland would be nothing compared to the devastation that would be employed in Britain itself.
Behind him, General Mathews coughed. The Prime Minister turned, walking slowly to take his seat at the head of the table. On the wall display, the area…infected by the Posleen glowed accusingly, a giant unblinking eye coloured red. He scanned the room slowly, taking in their faces; those who would support him, those who saw his position as weakening under the Posleen invasion.
Politics, he thought, making the word a curse. Even now, with the very survival of the entire world at stake, they were playing politics. It was stupid, it was…irritating, and it was human. Did the Posleen have politics?
“How many did we lose?” He asked flatly. “How many of our people lost their lives?”
There was a short chilling silence. “We lost around thirty thousand soldiers,” General Mathews said finally. “The defenders who fought in the final lines, trying to hold back the enemy in Manchester itself, were almost completely wiped out. Some of them survived, but they are trapped within the city.”
The Leader of the Opposition lifted an eyebrow. “How are you still in contact with them?”
The Prime Minister was almost grateful for the imprudent question. “The landlines, more or less, have survived the experience,” General Mathews said. “Some people are holed up in shelters the Posleen haven’t found. The bastards are getting very good at tracking our radio transmissions, and we don’t have enough Galactic units to go around.”
There was a second reason for that, but not everyone at the table was cleared to know about it. The Prime Minister sighed; there was a question he had to ask, and he didn’t want to ask it. He didn’t want to know the answer, even though he knew that he had to know the answer.
“And how many civilians died?” He asked. “How many managed to escape to the north?”
General Mathews hesitated. “It’s harder to be certain with civilians,” he said. “The bastards have landed in one of our most populous regions, but seven million people have left for the Sub-Urbs. A rough estimate is upwards of four million people, sir; it could very well be higher.”
The Prime Minister put his head in his hands. “And all of them are going to feed the Posleen,” he said. “General, what can we do now?”
It was General Anderson who spoke. “There are something like twelve million Posleen in the…occupied territory,” he said. “Spread out as they are, our only choice is to let them grind themselves to death against our defences.”
“Or go nuclear,” the Foreign Secretary said. His work had suddenly dwindled to relations with America, Ireland and Europe. “The Chinese went nuclear, at the end.”
“Parliament ruled it out,” the Prime Minister said firmly. “The MPs were not prepared, particularly the ones from Greater Manchester and Bath, to condone the use of tactical nuclear weapons. So…what are they going to do next?”
“I think that they’re going to try for Liverpool,” Anderson said. The officer who’d once war-gamed a European invasion of the United Kingdom looked haggard. It was always fun – until someone lost an eye. “They’re certainly bulging out towards Liverpool, massing the Posleen soldiers and their landers.”
The Prime Minister frowned. “Why not drive directly for London?”
Anderson shrugged. “Sir, I could give you any number of possible reasons, but there would be no hope of getting them right. I have theories, but no certainties. It’s possible that the God King in overall charge – assuming that there is such a figure – wants to help out the Posleen in Ireland.”
“They’ll be lucky,” General Mathews muttered. The Posleen in Ireland had been broken. There were still thousands of them left, but without any God King they were just armed animals.
“Perhaps,” Anderson agreed. “Another possibility is that they’re trying to prevent us from evacuating civilians to Ireland.”
The Minister for War Production blinked. “Do they know that we’re doing that?”
“Impossible to say,” Anderson said. The Prime Minister said nothing, but thought much; the Darhel would certainly have known and might have passed that little titbit on to the Posleen. “On yet another hand, they might simply be pinching off Liverpool before we can fortify it. Wales might have lost Cardiff, but the fortified Sub-Urbs in the mountains cost them dearly before they broke off. The point is, within a day or so Liverpool will be attacked, and that means that most of the three million or so civilians have to go to Ireland.”
“We can’t get them into the Wales Sub-Urbs or up to Scotland?” The Prime Minister asked. “Do we have the shipping to lift them all to Ireland?”
“The Posleen are between the civilians and the Wales Sub-Urbs,” Mathews said. He’d given the matter some thought. “We might be able to move some up north, but the main west coast rail line got wrecked, and the Posleen overran some of the stations. We have repair crews out and we expanded the rail network, but it simply doesn’t have the capability of moving all of the civilians.”
The Foreign Secretary smiled. “The Irish will not be too happy at having three million civilians dumped on them,” he said.
“It won’t be three million,” Anderson said, harshly. “It will be around half that, if we’re lucky.”
“And if we don’t start moving them now, they’ll all be lost,” the Prime Minister said.
Mathews nodded. “There is a further consideration,” he said. “If the Posleen realise what we’re doing, however they do it, they will attempt to move faster. They could reach Liverpool within a few hours if they launched the attack now.”
“Even in this weather,” the Press Secretary said. “It’s snowing in Germany and the Highlands, but its raining everywhere else.”
“I don’t think that cold or wet bothers them,” Anderson said.
Mathews tapped the map. “We have to buy time,” he said. “Sir, I request permission to deploy the mobile units to reinforce the defence of Liverpool.”
The Prime Minister hesitated. “I understand,” he said finally. “Permission is granted, General.”
***

The Darhel Tir cursed the Posleen with all the fervour of one denied the right to use the worst swearwords he had learnt from his human underlings. The fear of lintatai was too strong, even for him; he could not risk the profits of his group because of a spurt of rage, no matter how satisfying it would be before the collapse into madness. He nibbled a carrot, watching his sharp teeth tearing through the vegetable, and cursed again.

The idiots changed their plans because of what I told them, he thought. It made a grim kind of sense; his taps into humanity’s landlines made it clear that the humans had known that the Posleen were massing to receive the attack, so they’d changed their own plans. The humans had managed to hold open a corridor and save thousands of their own people from being threshed. Two days after the Posleen landing, and things were already going wrong.
Idiots, the Tir thought again. What would the Posleen do now? They knew, thanks to him, that humans were evacuating to Ireland, now that the Irish Posleen had been pretty much destroyed or scattered. Would they do the sensible thing and head towards Liverpool, or would they seek to continue battering their heads against Wales - or would they head towards London. Not for the first time, the Tir wondered how a country as small as Britain had managed to become so powerful – without opposition, the Posleen could be in London in less than a day.
The Tir shuddered. Occasionally, Darhel had faced the Posleen – almost always unsuccessfully. The thought of his flesh been rendered and torn and…
In a flurry of motion, the Tir spun to his computer and altered some of the data being fed to the Posleen. Both the humans and the Posleen would have been very surprised to discover that the defences of London had nearly three times as much men and equipment as they had in reality.
After all, the Net said it, so it had to be true. Right?