A massive set of contrails was burning across the sky. The sight was eerie, almost impossible to grasp, a set of… rockets moving through the air. He scrabbled for the binoculars someone had left on the roof and pulled them to his eyes, wincing as the brightness of the rockets almost blinded him. He’d seen, a long time ago, a movie about the first astronauts returning to Earth, their space capsule overheating as it came down in the atmosphere and what he was seeing now was almost exactly the same. It would be nice to believe that the alien craft had somehow been destroyed and were burning up in the atmosphere, but he couldn’t cling to the delusion. The aliens were landing… somewhere in the direction of San Angelo.
They’re insane, he thought, his ears echoing with the sound of their passage. They might be hundreds of kilometres above the Earth, but he could still hear them… and the thunderclaps of their KEWs impacting around the city. The Patriot missile batteries that had survived the first exchange of fire wouldn’t survive this one; as he watched, a flare of white light flashed up in the city, followed by a thunderous explosion. Windows were shattering all over the city. He didn’t want to think about the number of people who had been hurt in the invasion.
“We’ll eat them alive,” the gun nut said, with heavy satisfaction. He was toting a long rifle-like weapon that somehow managed to look completely terrifying. Joshua wouldn’t have bet against it being an illegal military-grade sniper rifle. “If they’re on the ground, they can be killed, right?”
Joshua shrugged. The closest he’d been to Iraq had been Florida, but he’d read enough about the insurgency against American forces to know that fighting the aliens was going to be bloody, very bloody. The aliens might have their own way of fighting insurgencies… or maybe they would force the Texans to turn Austin into a post-modern version of Stalingrad.
He smiled suddenly. If nothing else, he was going to get one hell of a story.
* * *
The enemy attempts to engage the landing craft hadn’t been entirely unsuccessful. A handful of the smaller, expendable craft had been hit with ABM warheads and destroyed, the stresses of their sudden course change tearing them apart. Two of the larger landing craft had rocked as warheads detonated under their heat shields, but the shields were strong enough to absorb the blow without significant damage. Retro-rockets fired madly to slow the descent, trying to ensure that the craft landed without emulating a KEW and causing massive damage — while incidentally keeping the crew and warriors alive.
An alien town seemed to spin up at them and they came down, hard. Shockwaves ran through the entire fleet of landing craft, but the warriors had braced themselves for the impact and were unhurt. Rapidly, knowing that they might be coming under fire at any moment, they ran for their escape hatches and vehicles, spilling out onto the new world they had come to conquer. One way or the other, there was no way back to the Guiding Star, not unless they secured a safe landing site for the spaceplanes. The landing craft could never return to space.
* * *
“Dear holy shit.”
Sergeant Oliver Pataki stared in disbelief as the small unit made its way towards the alien landing site. They’d been on a patrol of the area, just to check up on the thousands of refugees who’d fled the city and to locate possible deployment areas for Third Corps when the aliens had started to land. They’d had to seek shelter as the aliens had landed, the noise of their landing had been deafening, even at their distance, but now they were heading towards the alien positions. The higher-ups back at Fort Hood would need intelligence just to decide on a response.
Fort Hood was huge. The aliens had hit it, but they hadn’t actually done much damage… although they had killed several hundred men. If the remains of Third Corps could get into position to engage the enemy before they were deployed, the human race would win the first engagement with the aliens on the ground. Pataki knew, however, that that wasn’t going to be easy. Part of the platoon’s duties had been to check up on the damage to the roads and transportation network and they’d discovered that the aliens had blown the shit out of it. He didn’t fancy driving a few hundred Abrams tanks towards the aliens, not when the aliens would see them coming from orbit… and would probably drop a hammer on them. He’d listened to the briefings on possible enemy weapons with great care; some of them had been outrageously impossible, but others were all too practical. The crater back at Fort Hood provided all the proof of that that he could possibly want.
The massive column of towering flames reached into the sky. It seemed to be completely uncontrollable and he found himself wondering if the aliens had suffered a terrible disaster and had crashed into the ground. It wouldn’t have been that impossible — he was fairly sure that the aliens weren’t magicians, even if they could do things that humans couldn’t do — but somehow he doubted it. They wouldn’t have set out to invade a planet unless they were sure that they could actually land on it.
“Scott, stay behind,” he ordered, tersely. If they reached the top of that hill, they should have a good vantage point for staring down at the alien activities. Unless he missed his guess, the aliens had actually come down, intentionally or otherwise, on top of a small town. The population… he hoped they’d all fled, but if they’d been caught in the open. “If something happens to us, haul ass out of here.”
“Sergeant,” Scott said, tersely. Pataki could see the disappointment in his eyes, but someone had to remain to watch from a distance. “Good luck.”
Pataki led the quick march up the hill. It was only a handful of minutes before they reached the top — it wasn’t a very high hill — and they gazed cautiously down onto a scene from nightmares. The entire town seemed to be on fire, with human bodies scattered everywhere… and alien craft seemed to be distributing their troops. He pulled his binoculars to his eyes and stared down at the massive craft. They looked to be giant conical ships, each one the size of a major warship… and hundreds of aliens and their vehicles were spilling out of them. He watched, hypnotized, as the first marching group of aliens advanced out of the town.
They weren’t human. Standing still, wrapped in black body armour that concealed everything, it was easy to mistake them for humans, but as they moved, they bent and flexed in ways impossible for a human. They seemed almost to be made out of stiff jelly, each one moving almost like a shimmering mass, but yet… they marched perfectly in time. Pataki forced down the growing sense of unreality, remembering an encounter, long ago, with a humanoid android he’d seen at a science-fair, and forced himself to concentrate on the aliens. There seemed to be hundreds of them, maybe thousands, maybe more! They’d certainly gotten there the first with the most!
He wished, suddenly, that he had a nuke. A single nuke would have killed them all and put an end to their invasion of the planet. He watched as they set up machines around their landing site, some of them obviously designed to defend against aerial attacks, while others advanced out to secure an expanding perimeter. Large alien tanks — they had to be tanks — hummed up towards their position, riding on cushions of air. The hover tanks seemed unbothered by any kind of terrain.
Duty reasserted itself and he lifted his radio to his mouth. He could only hope that the alien jamming wouldn’t affect the signal. Fort Hood had to know what was going on and what the aliens were doing, whatever the risk. He composed a brief message and spoke, quickly, as the aliens headed around the hill and onwards to conquer the virgin land. He knew that they weren’t unstoppable, but from their position, they looked as if they had already won.
No, he thought, as he repeated his signal. They haven’t won yet.
Chapter Thirteen
Get there first with the most men.
— Nathan Bedford Forrest
The President had been working on some of the plans for reconstructing the country when Colonel Paul James burst in and disturbed him. It had astonished Paul how much and how little the President actually did; before he’d started to work with the President closely, he’d imagined the President as having his hand i
n almost everything. Instead, the President and his Cabinet set policy and left actually carrying out the policy to lower levels, something that had caused more than its fair share of problems in its time. The US had had several President who hadn’t been quite as black as they’d been painted, but had taken the blame for not micro-managing everything, despite the fact that that was impossible. The United States was the most complex nation on the Earth and micro-managing everything would have been impossible.
“Mr President,” he said, grimly. “There’s an invasion!”
The President blanched. That had been pretty much Paul’s reaction when the first reports had started to come in from Fort Hood of the alien landings. He’d known that he might be faced with the possibility of an alien invasion one day, but the President hadn’t known… and if he’d thought about it at all before the alien mothership had been detected, he would have dismissed it as science-fiction. America was almost impossible to invade and impossible to invade successfully… until now. The aliens might change all the rules.
“I see,” the President said, finally. He still looked stunned, but at least he was reacting. “Where are they landing?”
“Texas,” Paul said. He was tempted to make a redneck joke, but there wasn’t time; besides, Texas had been one of the states that the President had lost during the election. “Sir, they’re landing in force. You have to come to the Situation Room, now…”
There was a new air of urgency in the situation room when they arrived. The operators were even busier than they’d been during the first attacks, trying to pull information out of the airwaves and the internet. The aliens had wiped out the satellites, but large parts of the military communications network remained intact, enough to allow them to rebuild their communications, given time. Communications outside the United States were still fragmentary, but inside the United States, they worked almost as normal. It wasn’t as reassuring as it should have been.
The main display had been focused entirely on Texas. Paul had been surprised to discover that it could cope with an invasion of the United States at all, but it was just a simple matter of programming. There were hundreds of new KEW strikes all over Texas — and the surrounding states — but also three areas on the map, completely shaded in red. The alien landings had been detected, easily, but interdicting them had proven impossible. If some of the estimates were to be believed, the aliens might have landed a million tons or more of material…
But it wasn’t going to be an easy conquest. Paul had once taken part in an exercise that had been based around an invasion of America. The conclusion had been that it would take upwards of six million soldiers and very unpleasant rules of engagement to succeed in invading the United States; if nothing else, most of the adults in Texas would have a gun. People had been buying them madly in the weeks since the announcement of alien contact. They could make life very unpleasant for the aliens… but what methods would the aliens use to maintain control?
“I spoke to General Ridgley briefly,” General Hastings was saying. “Third Corps is attempting to get organised to mount a counterattack, but it’s not going to be easy. The aliens are spreading out rapidly and anything of ours they detect gets smashed from orbit. Fort Hood isn’t crippled, but anything that transmits a radio signal of any kind gets smashed, so we’re losing our ability to maintain tactical control.”
The President stared desperately at him. “But there will be resistance, right?”
“Of course,” General Hastings said. Paul could hear the grim resolution in his voice, the professional military man unwilling to admit that his country could be beaten. “The National Guard, militias, people with guns… but a lot of it is going to be uncoordinated. We need to get organised and get a heavy force in there and that’s not going to be easy. It’s the old problem; who gets there the first with the most wins, and our ability to reinforce has been curtailed.”
“Send them in at night,” Paul suggested, suddenly. “Failing that, wait for heavy cloud cover and then attack their positions.”
“In Texas?” General Hastings asked, dryly. “We barely know what’s happening. God along knows what’s happening in the red zone, under the fog of war. We can’t peer down from orbit any more, can we?”
“Have your people do what they can,” the President said. He sounded almost broken. No American President, with the possible exception of Lincoln, had presided over so much destruction. The country he loved was getting torn apart. “We have to do what we can to help the Texans. They’re Americans too…”
* * *
Captain Felicia Argyris winced as the Warthog flew low over the ground. Normally, she would have a wingman coming up behind her and other American aircraft in the air, but most of the bases in Texas had been hit — badly — from orbit. Her A-10 Warthog had only survived because it had been placed in a warehouse and concealed from orbit, along with a handful of other planes. Flying with the aliens in such complete control of space was almost suicide, but Felicia was determined to hit back at them at least once before she was grounded permanently. The odds were that some hotshot male pilot who’d used to fly F-22s would try to claim her Warthog… and the fighter pilot mafia would ensure that he succeeded.
She could see the towering pillars of smoke rising up in the distance as she raced towards the alien landing zones. The last report had said that at least a dozen alien cone-shaped craft had landed in Texas and that they were deploying their ground forces rapidly, securing their landing sites and ensuring that humans didn’t get to go near them. Third Corps would engage as soon as possible — she found herself praying for them; her brothers were both deployed as part of Third Corps — but until then, they had to be delayed, somehow. That meant that she had to fly into harm’s way, again, and hurt them as much as she could.
It was strange, flying without a GPS or radio chatter, but there was no choice. A radio signal meant certain death around the aliens. The last reports had been that anything transmitting a signal had been hit, a list that had included cell phone masts and pirate radio stations, all of which had been destroyed. She’d also been warned to keep active emissions to a minimum, so she had no terrain-following radar or IFF transmitter. It would be ironic, after everything, if she was blown out of the sky by her own side, but it was a risk she had to take. She wasn’t going to give up without a fight.
“Warning,” the onboard computer said, suddenly. She’d selected a male voice, a whimsy from friendlier times. She’d used to joke about a man who always did what he was told, but it didn’t seem so funny now. “Hostile transmissions detected.”
Felicia glanced down briefly at the display. The aliens were using a more sophisticated system than she’d anticipated, but she’d trained to operate in far more hostile environments. Judging from the deployment of their air-search radars and even from some of their radio transmissions, they were heading for the interstate that would lead them directly to Austin. That had been anticipated; unless they had some magical form of antigravity, they would need the interstates — or what was left of them — to move their own people around. She flew low over a crowd of refugees, people struggling to get away from the aliens… and then, as she approached the interstate, she saw them.
For a chilling moment, she thought that they were human vehicles… and then she realised that the tanks had no tracks. They hovered, a third of a metre off the ground, advancing at terrifying speed towards Austin. They didn’t seem to have encountered any resistance, so far; they were just racing onwards. Burning human cars blocked their way, but they seemed to be capable of evading them, their hovering forms gliding over the cars, or avoiding them. Suddenly, with shocking speed, the aliens turned towards her, the dark barrels of their weapons pointing up towards her aircraft.
She flipped up the protective cover for the trigger and pushed the trigger down as hard as she could. The Warthog’s heavy Gatling gun thundered out and a pair of alien tanks exploded into balls of fire. She threw the Warthog into an evasive pattern as a thi
rd alien vehicle drew a bead on her and a streak of… something flashed just past her wing. The Warthog was a tough bird, but somehow she doubted that she’d be flying home if one of the alien weapons struck her. She twisted through the air, locked on to a second group of alien vehicles and selected a pair of cluster bombs. A satisfying series of explosions billowed up below her as she turned her aircraft and…
The laser beam struck the underside of the Warthog and started to burn through the armour. Felicia had only a second to realise that there was a problem and by then, it was too late. The laser burned through the aircraft and send the remains crashing to Earth, smashing down into the ground. Behind her, the aliens recovered and continued onwards towards Austin.
* * *
“It’s confirmed, sir,” the aide said. There was a grim helpless note in his voice. The United States was not used to defeat. “We got distress sequels from all of the Warthogs.”
General Ridgley winced. Normally, he would be commanding from a bunker, rather than a heavily camouflaged command vehicle. He’d had to send the Warthogs into the fray, in hopes of delaying the aliens and obtaining intelligence on their deployments, but they’d all been burned out of the air. The UAVs and even the handful of supersonic fighters he’d risked had suffered the same fate; the aliens, it seemed, were really determined to keep the human race out of the air.
“Send a runner down to the camp,” he ordered shortly. He’d grown up in a world where intelligence would arrive almost at once, where he could command his forces from half a world away… but that world was gone. If they sent a single radio signal, the aliens would smash them from orbit, probably without ever knowing what they had done. They were dependent, now, on runners, either on foot or using motorbikes. Without them, he would be completely cut off from the rest of his force. The field telephones weren’t working very well. “Tell them that we’ll meet them outside Austin.”
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