Battle- Earth

by Mark Harrison

  With his dog and the pieces of the orb, Rick made his way back to the place he’d tried to forget. It was there that he learned the truth behind the international crisis and the orb. He also learned the truth about his father.

  When Rick showed up at SpaceForce with the orb, General Tarkin, SpaceForce’s head honcho, a real dick head, tossed Rick the un-redacted documents of the Olympus Mons mission. In those documents, it became clear that his father hadn’t gone crazy. While his father sounded crazy at the time, in light of recent events, it was clear that Captain Blake Frost was the first individual to have seen the alien invaders up close. The orb Rick found in South Dakota was exactly like one of the orbs Captain Frost reported to have seen while aboard the Olympus Mons ship. It was the orbs that took the ship down. It was the orbs that ruined his life.

  The alien invasion proved that Blake Frost, Rick’s father, wasn’t crazy. SpaceForce were beginning to realize that they were the ones who were wrong. They should have believed him. Captain Frost was trying to warn them. Trying to help them. They’d dismissed him.

  Of course, Rick wanted to scream and punch General Tarkin in the face when he read the report. But he knew it wasn’t their fault. At the time, his father would have sounded crazy. Fuck. Reading it now, it still sounded crazy. If it wasn’t for the motherships hovering above every major city in the world, it still would be. But it wasn’t crazy. And there were alien invaders all over the Earth and they’d started to attack.

  If Rick had anyone to blame for his father’s death, it was the aliens. When Sam Matters’s told him where he was going, Rick volunteered to fight. He grabbed a SpaceForce commando jacket and an AR-99 SpaceForce rifle. It was time to fight back. He’d take care of the SpaceForce officials who’d mocked his father later. Their time would come. First things first, he needed to kill some aliens.

  Rick stopped wiping his rifle. It was clean enough. He looked at it. It had an attached touch screen on its body and a longrange tracking scope that was capable of highlighting organic material up to four hundred yards away. Great for shooting at humans, not so great at taking down metallic alien spacecraft. Its body was rough and had seen some action. Most likely during the U.S. Army’s occupation of Venezuela in 2038. Aside from the rifle, Rick wore a military-grade backpack. Inside were medical supplies, ammunition, binoculars and a gas mask. He wasn’t well equipped to fight off attacking aliens, but that didn’t matter. What he lacked in supplies, he’d make up for in fighting spirit.

  “SpaceForce always gets the hand-me-downs, eh, Sam?” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Sam said. “We don’t have the budget of the army or the navy.”

  Rick laughed. “No need to apologize, old buddy. I’m pulling your chain. These will do. If they can pierce through metal, we should be able to do some damage.”

  “Early reports suggest, we have a chance. A group of soldiers in Houston reported they’d been able to take one of those things down.”

  “Just one?”

  “It’s better than nothing. It means their ships are not impenetrable.”

  “Fuck,” said Rick. “As long as I get to kill at least one alien, I’ll be happy, I guess.”

  Sam and the rest of the soldiers aboard the truck laughed. Rick smirked. One wouldn’t be enough. He wanted to fucking annihilate these things, the way they’d destroyed his life. He wanted to take them all down. He looked out the window again. The small ships that had emerged from the mothership flew in strange patterns. Like the motherships, they looked unnatural in the sky, like they didn’t belong. He didn’t want to doubt himself or the mission, but he was beginning too. Only one? Was this a suicide mission?

  The military truck made its way to the west side of the San Gabriel mountains and the Los Angeles skyline appeared before them. It was hard not to feel uneasy. The motherships hovered over the horizon and casted giant dark shadows on the ground below. There must’ve been fifty of them. Each one casted a long shadow over the ground below. The shadow blanketed over the skyscrapers of the city.

  In the distance, explosions could be seen. They weren’t the first ones to arrive. Contingents of army tanks and soldiers could be seen . Every now and then one of their rockets would flash across the sky and hit the mothership. Tiny fragments of metal would rain from the sky. The rockets made an impact, but, relative to the size of the mothership, it was nothing more than a scratch. Rick turned away from the window. He didn’t want to look. He’d get to see some action soon.

  The military truck made its way through the mountains, then pulled off the highway onto a smaller road. Rick felt good getting off the highway. While the lanes heading into Los Angeles were empty. The lanes leaving the city were full of the smoking remains of the evacuation. The remnants of what were cars and trucks and the bodies of their inhabitants. He could tell that the scenes of destructions were lowering the morale of the soldiers aboard the truck. They’d need to believe that they had a fighting chance to actually have a chance against these things.

  “When did the attack start?” Rick asked.

  “Six hours ago. Last report said the small ships, Mission Control is calling them AOJs, left this area about thirty minutes ago. All this info is coming from the large contingent of army soldiers ahead of us.”

  “AOJs? What does that mean?”

  “Alien Offense Jets.”

  Rick smirked. Typical SpaceForce, make it as boring as possible.

  While the smaller road was not full of debris like the highways, it still had evidence of the destruction that had just taken place. Every now and then, they would pass a group of survivors. People who’d managed to avoid the immediate destruction of the alien’s attack. Each time they passed a group like that, Rick wondered how long they’d last? You couldn’t help but be a cynic.

  “We’re close,” Sam said.

  “Close?” Rick answered. “We’re hardly close to the center of the city?”

  Sam ignored Rick and walked up to the driver of the military truck and pointed to a road up ahead. “We need to go up that road,” he said.

  “Why?” said the driver.

  “Just do it.”

  The military truck driver disengaged the autopilot and manually drove up the road Sam pointed to. It was a long winding road and it went up a large hill. At the top of it was a large, white building. The truck driver pulled the truck over when they got to the building. Everyone got out.

  Rick was the last to walk out. He jumped out of the back of the truck with his rifle in his hands. The sun was starting to set. He looked out toward the Los Angeles skyline. The motherships that hovered above it hung like black silhouettes against the purple of the sky. The AOJs looked like bats, zooming up and down, firing their blue plasma bursts in all directions. The doubt that was starting to linger in Rick’s mind crept forward once more. Maybe they shouldn’t be here. He wanted to kill the aliens, but this looked impossible.

  Sam called the SpaceForce soldiers over to him. Rick followed suit.

  “Alright,” he said. “This is where we are going to set up our base of operations. Our mission is to stay at the perimeter of the city and provide SpaceForce Mission Control with the intel they need to launch an air assault against these mother fuckers. This is going to be the biggest air assault on American soil in the history of the US. This is our one chance to get back at these fuckers. Once we set up a post at the observatory, we will set up a communication link with mission control. If everything works, we’ll call in our jets. Sound good?”

  Every soldier let a guttural “good.” Rick didn’t say anything. He kept looking at the motherships and the AOJs. Whatever the fuck these things were, they weren’t playing around. He needed to look away from the city. He needed to focus. It didn’t matter what he thought their odds were of survival. He was here now. He needed to help them out every way possible.

  Rick looked up at the observatory, he understood why Sam chose the spot. It was at the top of the mountain. It would be easy to communicate between what wa
s going on downtown and Mission Control in Las Vegas. Communication would be key if they were to have any success out here.

  Rick heard Sam saying that before the aliens arrived, Earth’s entire satellite network was knocked out. SpaceForce command believed that the aliens knew how to fuck us over. They knew our weak spot. Once we lost our satellite communications, we were useless. For over one hundred years, we’d taken for granted our ability to send communications from one side of the Earth to the other with little interference. But with out satellites down, we had to rely on tech from the 1940s or earlier. We weren’t prepared for anything like this. The only way to communicate over long distances was via radio towers. Many of which were out of service or unreliable. Making it worse, the AOJs seemed to be able to identify the radio towers. They were starting to attack them, disrupting communication further. When one tower went down, communication traffic would have to reroute to another tower.

  Rick turned away from the destruction of the city. One of the last things he saw was a skyscraper topple over. It was the U.S. Bank Tower. He watched as it turned into nothing more than a smouldering pit of fire and ash. He grimaced. Los Angeles would never be the same again. He turned back to Sam and listened to the rest of his debrief.

  As they set up their base of operations, a few survivors stumbled out of the building. They thought they were going to be rescued. Rick didn’t have the heart to tell them that this wasn’t a rescue mission. This was an attack mission. These poor people would have to find their own way out of the city.

  Below the observatory there was a road. Rick looked down below and saw other survivors. They all looked as distraught as the next. One man was pushing a shopping cart, jam packed full of food. Rick noticed the man also had a bunch of dirty magazines in the cart. It made him smile. Even during the apocalypse, our innate desires beat out our better instincts. That man could have grabbed more food. But instead, he grabbed some porno magazines. One woman held her chihuahua in her hands, her face was covered in blood. The dog didn’t have a scratch on it.

  Each survivor had tears in their eyes. But the most disturbing thing Rick saw was that of a group of people who looked trapped within a highway miles below the observatory. They were all dead. Some of their bodies were so burned you couldn’t tell they were human. Rick pulled out his binoculars to get a better look. This wasn’t out of some morbid curiosity. He wanted to know what he was up against. He wanted to know what these things were capable of. What he saw through his binoculars tore him up inside. He saw the body of a little girl, clutching her pink teddybear. Her body was badly burned. He put his binoculars down and turned away. He couldn’t look anymore. As he turned away, he clutched his rifle. He wanted to take these fuckers down.

  It didn’t take long for them to set up the base. Once it was ready, Sam called down to mission control and gave them a breakdown of the devastation and of where the motherships were located.

  The battle for Los Angeles was about to begin.

  Chapter 2

  John Slate watched General Sanders Tarkin pace back and forth. He couldn’t blame him. The entire country was under attack and SpaceForce charged him with making sure that every branch of the US military was up to date with information about the alien motherships. He was in SpaceForce Mission Control’s command centre and was dead tired. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d slept. He wanted a coffee. He wanted his office. He didn’t want to see the man who’d married ex-wife. But that’s who he saw. Chris Dellon, NASA’s Administrator, walked up to him. Chris didn’t have the usual smirk that he wore on his face.

  “I still haven’t heard from Sharon,” Chris said.

  “I’m sure she’s alright. Give her time.”

  Sharon was Chris’s wife and John’s ex. He understood why Chris was worried. Fuck, he was worried, too. But he didn’t want Chris to know. He didn’t want to appear weak in front of his rival. Most of all, he didn’t want Chris to know he still had feelings for Sharon. Feelings that he didn’t know existed until the invasion.

  If Sharon was dead, though, he’d blame Chris. Why didn’t he give her notice? Why did he leave her in Houston? The bastard always put his job before anything else. Even massive alien ships invading Earth couldn’t knock him off his routine. John found it ironic. That’s why Sharon left him ten years ago. She thought Chris was going places. And she was right, he was. He ended up as NASA’s Administrator. John ended up where Sharon left him, as an MIT professor. But now she was stuck on the highway somewhere and John was here, safe and sound, in SpaceForce Mission Control. The two men stared at each other for a brief moment, unsure of what to say. Chris was holding a document. John used it as a way to break the silence. “Do you have the latest report?”

  “Uh, yes,” Chris said. “Here.” He handed John the report and opened his phone, checking to see if Sharon had contacted him. She hadn’t.

  John read the document.

  General Sanders Tarkin continued to pace, he had never seen mission control so busy. His head was spinning. Everything was happening so fast. When the alien ships first broke through the atmosphere, SpaceForce was charged with trying to establish communications. The ships responded to nothing. Not light patterns. Not radio broadcasts. Nothing. Then, after only a couple hours hovering in the sky, they attacked. First in Moscow, then in New York, then everywhere else. Reports came in quick at first, but communication chains were failing quick. Washington D.C had been radio silent for thirty-four minutes. No word from the President. No word from any of his chiefs of staff. The general was running out of options. What the hell was happening out there? He had to keep going. He had to keep fighting. But in the back of his mind, a question crept up: what was he fighting for? How long before it would all be gone?

  “Sir, we’ve established a communication link with the recon team in Los Angeles. They’re in position. We’ve relayed the info they sent us to the AirForce. We have over two hundred X-91 Raptors ready for takeoff.”

  The X-91 Raptors were the latest AirForce tech. They were developed in partnership with SpaceForce. They could fly for a few minutes in the upper stratosphere, miles above the nearest commercial passenger jet. They were developed with the intention to defend or shoot down Earth’s lower orbit satellites, not alien ships, in the event of a Space war. They were the quickest, deadliest jets in US military history. This was the first time they were being used in combat.

  Communication specialist, Walt Duclair looked at the general with a blank face, waiting for a response. He’d never seen the general so uneasy, so unsure of himself.

  “The alien ships,” said the general. “Are they still attacking the city?”

  “Affirmative, sir. Commander Sam Matters said the devastation is catastrophic. They’ve sent us a video.”

  The general motioned to Walt to play it. He didn’t want to watch. He hadn’t heard from his family in hours. As much as he wanted to be the leader he’d always thought he was, he was tearing up inside. He wanted to scream. He wanted to be back home with his family. He wanted to kiss his wife.

  Walt played the video on the command center’s main screen. The video was taken from Commander Matters’s base of operations at the Griffith Observatory. Matters and the rest of his recon team were sent their to assess the alien threat and to serve a communication hub between the different branches of the military. As the video played, it became clear that Los Angeles was lost. The city was nothing more than a smouldering pit of ash. Skyscrapers were collapsed, fire and smoke was everywhere. The motherships hovered atop the city like dark, metallic clouds. The AOJs dotted the horizon, sending blue pulses of light toward the ground. Each time they fired, an explosion followed. The general was devastated. It was worse than he’d imagined. His troops weren’t prepared for this. He wasn’t prepared for this. Near the end of the video, Commander Matters walked in front of the camera and gave his report.

  “We count thirty motherships in total. The AOJs are too many to count. There must be hundreds of them. Maybe thou
sands. They attack in wave like patterns, systematic. They circle a target area about three hundred feet above it and dive in to attack in groups of five or six. They don’t stray far from their mothership. Their plasma bursts explode anything they touch. So far we are undetected. We will continue to watch the situation from the observatory and relay anything we find to you. We’ll do this until it’s not safe to do so.”

  As the video ended, there were audible gasps in the command center. The general had been coordinating with SpaceForce recon teams since the attacks began. They’d heard dozens of reports, but they hadn’t seen much of the action. With the Earth’s satellite network disabled, sending live video from location to location was impossible. No one in mission control knew how bad it was. No one had seen anything in a few hours, not since the initial attacks began. Seeing it now was like a punch to the gut.

  The general ordered Walt to send Commander Matters’s information to the AirForce base outside of Vegas. From there, the AirForce could launch the X-91s. Hopefully, this attack would be different than the last. The first recon team to contact General Tarkin coordinated a similar attack. They were a small platoon of soldiers in Dallas. Once they got close to Dallas, they used their rocket launchers to shoot down a couple AOJs. They were about to set up a base of operations, but were spotted by another group of AOJs. They didn’t last long. Fighter jet squadrons on the eastern seaboard encountered similar problems. Like the soldiers in Dallas, they’d managed to shoot down a couple AOJs, but they were quickly outnumbered. No matter how many fighter jets the AirForce had in the sky, the AOJs always outnumbered them. It was an unfair fight. Every attack that they had launched had failed. For every step forward they made, they took three steps back.

  John Slate watched Commander Matters’s video in awe. He turned to Chris and whispered, “What do you think those plasma bursts are made of?” Like any good scientist, he was curious. He didn’t want to blow the alien ships out of the sky, he wanted to study them, to figure them out.