by J. F. Holmes
“You’ll see in a second, Colonel. And it’s General.”
“Whatever. What’s this spectacular plan of yours?”
“You’ll see.”
The Invy had advanced a mile with no resistance. The armor moved out in good discipline, two tanks with tubes alternating in each direction, interspersed with a half dozen APCs and several cargo carriers. Occasional rifle fire drove any flankers back onto the road, and they hurried their pace. Safety was only a few miles away.
The Texan lifted a radio to his mouth and yelled, “NOW!” A second later, the earth underneath the front half of the convoy, all of it, erupted in a series of thunderous explosions. The first tank, half the APCs, and several trucks vanished though, one turret flipping up into the air and landing on a truck. The ground shook, and they felt the overpressure in their lungs more than a mile away.
“Learned that in Afghanistan,” said General Covington.
“That’s a hell of a lot of explosives!” said Arendse. He wasn’t stupid; what had been done was masterful. Channeling the Invy forces, keeping them on the highway when they could have, actually should have, moved overland.
“Yep, looted an entire airbase of two-thousand-pound bombs. That was about forty of them. UP AND AT ’EM!” shouted the general into his radio, and the Main Force unit, what had been his unit, started firing into the dazed survivors. They poured it on, targeting the remaining armor, snipers firing at individual Wolverines.
Then there was a ripping sound, and a volley of high-explosive shells landed directly on the human positions, a crashing barrage that hammered them down into their trenches and caused scores of casualties. The colonel had dived to the ground when he heard the first sounds, yelling “INCOMING!” at the top of his lungs.
From the south, below the Thirtieth Parallel, came a full company of Invy tanks, their plasma cannons hammering the hillsides, targeting any launchers who fired. A volley of Javelin missiles took out two, but then sensors started picking them from the sky.
Arendse crawled over to the wrecked Humvee and grabbed the radio mic, switching it over to the Fires Net. There was a CEF MLRS battery firing at the Invy troops in Houston; they might be able to range the Invy guns.
“SPARKY, SPARKY, THIS IS VOLUNTEER, ANTI-ARMOR FIRE!”
“Go ahead with your fire mission, Volunteer, Over,” came back the flat, professional tones of the RTO.
Arendse took out a map and laid his fingers across it, trying to figure out a grid, as Sergeant Keith methodically sniped at the Wolverines. He ducked down as plasma shots reached out for their position, cursing.
General Covington dropped down beside him, a huge grin on his face, even as rounds kept impacting around them. “ISN’T IT AWESOME TO BE HERE AT THIS HISTORICAL MOMENT?” he yelled as another round burst close by.
“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?” yelled back the CEF colonel, and then went back to trying to find the pre-designated targets he’d made on his map.
“SPARKY, FIRE TARGET AA2013, ANTI-ARMOR, OVER!” he called into the radio. The impact of a heavy plasma bolt showered him with dirt, and Arendse crawled away from the radio, fearing it was drawing fire.
There was no need for him to tell everyone to get down; the Invy artillery had already killed anyone foolish enough to stand up. The fact that they actually HAD artillery had come as quite a shock to the CEF, firing from over the “border”, where humans couldn’t go. Apparently, it was something the Texans hadn’t planned for either, because they were getting chewed up.
The MLRS volley burst overhead, individual seeker rounds spilling out of the rockets, looking for armored shapes below. When one was detected, the munition locked onto it and, descent slowed by a ribbon streaming out, angled toward the target. At ten feet, it exploded, generating a self-forging penetrator of copper plasma that could burn through lighter top armor.
That was the theory, anyway. The Invy sensors directed small anti-missile guns on the turrets on intercept solutions, and the submunitions were swept from the sky. Most of them, anyway. Three of the dozen tanks were wrecked outright, and another two were mobility kills. Arendse cursed; he should have gone after the indirect fire tubes. That would have freed the anti-tank gunners up to do their jobs.
The colonel crawled back to the radio, but was surprised when the artillery stopped impacting, not even realizing it for a long moment. Instead, what he heard with his nearly-deafened ears was cheering from the men and women around him. He stood up and noticed that the plasma fire had stopped. Looking down into the valley, he saw that the Invy armor had turned and were fleeing down the highway as best they could, followed by the survivors of the ambush. The soldiers started to fire at them, but stopped when they received no return fire. It was as if a temporary truce had developed, both sides sick of the slaughter.
General Covington strode up to him and said, “Hey, you’re bleeding! But enough of that, come with me.” Arendse looked down at his arm and realized a piece of artillery shrapnel had indeed scored his skin, making a bloody gash.
He followed Covington into his own Humvee, remarkably untouched, and they tore off down the hillside following the Invy. “Where the hell are we going?” he asked the driver, Sergeant Keith. “Were you in on this too?”
“Can’t say I was, but I always operate alone. If it gets them off Texas soil, good enough for me.”
Chapter 94
They began to drive over bones more than a mile from the border, crunching them, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds, then uncountable. These were the millions who had died, suffering in the hot sun, from the genetically designed plague let loose by the Invy. The one that wiped out all humanity between thirty degrees North and South.
They followed the armored column closely, darting from cover to cover, but no one fired at them. The Wolverines trotted along next to the tanks, but the armor made no effort to slow down for them. Occasionally one would fall behind, or even fall in front of a vehicle, and get run down.
As it became apparent that they weren’t going to be fired on, Covington urged Sergeant Keith to get closer to the tail end of the convoy. Arendse spent the time trying to raise air support on the net, but the low-power FM radios were out of range. Frustrated, he watched the Invy cross the line, one by one, and lager up, guns pointing north. The Humvee stopped just short of a plywood sign with ‘30N’ printed on it, and under that, in both English and Spanish, “DEATH!” with a crude skull and crossbones. The bones lay thick underfoot as they stepped out of the truck, crushed to a fine dust where they’d fallen on the highway.
Holding a white shirt in one hand, General Covington motioned for Colonel Arsende to follow him, walking toward the sign. The colonel felt his skin crawl as he remembered the way the plague victims had died, blood pouring from every opening, screaming in agony. Sergeant Keith lay across the hood of the truck, rifle sighted on the lead Invy vehicle. Not that it would have mattered if they had decided to fire; they would all be dead in an instant.
A Dragon climbed out of one of the APCs, gold helmet shining, moving on all six legs until he reached their side of the vehicle. It reared up, and one true hand touched the translator at its throat. Covington understood the gesture, and spoke.
“The President of the Republic of Texas accepts the surrender and withdrawal of all Invy forces within the borders of our country, north of the thirtieth parallel.”
Arsende grabbed his arm and spun him around. “You don’t have the authority for that! There IS no Republic of Texas!” he said angrily.
Covington shook his hand off and said calmly, “Yes, there is. As of midnight last night, we seceded from the United States, not that it exists anymore. We will negotiate with the Confederate Earth Forces as a sovereign entity, and with the Invy also.”
“You’re out of your mind!” said the CEF officer. Then he saw, out of the corner of his eye, that Sergeant Keith’s aim had shifted slightly.
“Come now, Colonel. We’re just soldiers, doing what we’re told. Ev
erything else is determined by the politicians.”
He was interrupted by a hissing laugh from the Dragon, only twenty feet away. The translator spoke mechanically, rendering acceptable words in English. “You will defeat yourselves in the end, Humans. We accept your proposal, for now.” It laughed again, then said, “You can have your Republic, if you can keep it, as one of you once said.” With that, the Dragon turned and walked back to its APC, climbed in, and the entire column drove away, Wolverines trudging along into the dust.
“Now, Colonel,” said Covington, “you have two days to withdraw all CEF forces, and any troops who don’t want to stay, from the Republic’s borders, leaving everything behind except small arms and unarmored vehicles. I’m not talking the state borders, either. The old ones, before we joined the Union.”
“You’re all crazy. We need to stay united to defeat them!” and he pointed southward.
Covington smiled and said, “Oh, don’t worry. I’m sure you’ll see the Texas flag fighting next to the CEF. Just on our terms. You have forty-seven hours and fifty-nine minutes, Colonel. And all your equipment stays, too, don’t forget.”
“I’ll have to talk to my superiors,” said Arsende, defeated.
“By all means, but don’t waste any time.”
“You know this is going to come back to bite us in the ass, right?”
Covington’s smile was bitter this time. “Ask my dead children, who trusted in the CEF to win the war in space. Never again.”
The ride back to Austin was made in silence, with only the echo of the Dragon’s laughter to occupy the colonel’s mind.
"Tell the men to fire faster. Fight 'til she sinks, boys. Don't give up the ship."
— Captain James Lawrence, USN, June 1813
By Dawn’s Early Light
Bellingham, Washington, First day of the War
Chapter 95
A fog had settled over Puget Sound, obscuring the lights from the fighting still going on over by SeaTac. The old man sat on his porch, giving up on the enormous pair of ship’s binoculars that was mounted on his porch. It had started last night, or more like early in the morning, and the boom of heavy cannon fire, the crack and flash of large-caliber plasma cannons, and the fiery-red trails of suborbital bombardment had provided a hell of a show. The rods from space had finally stopped, but two of the orbitals still moved across the sky. He had no idea what the tactical situation was locally, or the strategic one, he just knew that his part was coming.
“Soon, Boomer, soon,” he said to the mutt lying at his feet. The nanos he’d been injected with just before the Invasion helped some, but Rear Admiral (R) Jonas Larken still felt every one of his eighty-five years deep in his soul.
When he’d started in the Navy, a raw enlisted recruit scrubbing out bilges on the last of the US Navy’s oil-fired carriers, the Kitty Hawk, well, if you’d told him that almost seventy years later he’d be leading a task force against aliens, he’d have laughed in your face. ROTC on a scholarship, moving up through the ranks quickly, to finally be the last commander of a big gun ship, the USS Missouri, as she pounded Iraqi positions in the first Gulf War. Had that really been almost fifty years ago? Holy crap.
Well, he would have to count on the nanos in his blood to keep him going for a while longer. One last mission for the Navy, then he could go home to his wife. He missed her terribly, but the fall of civilization after the invasion had broken her heart, and her frail body. She was eleven years in the grave, and he thought of her every day, but now his heart beat faster at what was to come. Action after so long. His sea bag lay at his feet, packed and ready to go, not that he needed much.
They came for him in a Blackhawk just before dawn on the second day, which was a good sign. It meant local air superiority, or at least minimal threat. A burly CEF Special Operations NCO whose nametag read ‘CRYER’ jumped out and came up to the porch, even as several others pulled security.
“Admiral,” he said, rendering a sharp salute, having to shout a bit over the rotor wash, “I’ve come to take you to the site. We’re rounding up what personnel we can, and Cascade base is sending techs. We’re going to meet them there.”
“I’m taking my dog with me!” said the old man.
“Of course, Sir. You don’t know me, but you were the presiding officer at my Dad’s court martial, just before you retired. Found him innocent, and I appreciate that.”
“Chief Petty Officer Cryer? I remember that. Disobeyed orders, rescuing kids from a village in Afghanistan. Good man. Are you a SEAL also?” he asked as they made their way across the lawn.
“I was, but CEF Spec Ops now, we’re all one branch. But we thought you might like some of the boys and girls around you, so we’re all from the Teams.” The NCO tossed the sea bag to the helo crew Chief, and then lifted the dog up. “What’s his name?”
“Boomer!” shouted the admiral as the rotors spun up again, “cause he’s always underneath my feet!” The Navy personnel who could hear laughed, and the admiral plugged into the aircraft intercom, motioning to CPO Cryer to do so also.
“What’s the tactical situation?” he asked, and the Chief filled him in.
“SeaTac is secure, but there’s still scattered fighting going on around the perimeter. The armor really took a beating; we only have one tank left, and some APCs. Close air support is out, because a plasma rifle will take down an A-10, but the Main Force units are hunting Invy survivors. Cascadia took two hits from suborbital bombardment, but the mountain held. We have coms with Raven Rock, but the plan hasn’t changed.”
“Pacific Northwest?” the officer asked. His body may have been old, but his mind was razor sharp.
Looking at his notes, because he’d expected the questions, the answer was, “We’ve been successful in taking back eleven of the twenty-seven Invy villages west of the mountains, down to the Columbia. Militia is on the way to assist Main Force units, and the Invy are kind of paralyzed. No forces moving except an armor attack out of JBLM, and that got beat to shit. Their other armor out of Portland is just sitting there, but we expect them to move against us sooner rather than later. It’s their biggest city in the northwest, over two thousand troops and ten thousand humans, mostly sympathizers to the Invy environmental bullshit.”
“Elsewhere on the West Coast?” asked the admiral, considering priorities.
“Command wants us to take out the big Invy guns at San Francisco. There’s a trio of heavy plasma cannons that, even if we take the high ground, will be able to knock any of our ships or stations out of Earth Orbit. Problem is, they’re located at the old Presidio, and fortified. Their smaller guns command the entire sea approaches and the bay, and they use their base to control all traffic between Northern and SoCal, and down into their territory at thirty north. The Marines have been infiltrating troops for an assault from the bay side, but unless they get covering fire, there’s no way they’re going to be able to take the fortress.”
“Strategic?”
More notes. “The Japs have a mission ramping up to go take out the last active orbital, and we hold the other one, but no fire support from them. That’s all we know for now.”
“OK, I’m sure HQ will be sticking their noses in soon enough. Tell me about the site.”
That was what he was most worried about. Eleven years, almost twelve, since the ships were sealed up. The technology, a blend of Earth and Invy, was experimental and new. Cramming it into hulls that had first been laid down almost a hundred years ago…
The reactors that provided the steam to drive the propeller shafts were the first crude copies of the one from the crashed scout craft, reverse engineered. Not good enough for the space navy, they’d been cast aside, and Larken had grabbed all five of them. Stealing them, actually, from the CEF base in New Mexico before the US Military had been formally incorporated into the Confederation. Matter of fact, he’d stolen a lot of things. Personnel from the Navy, shipyard workers from Bath and Newport News, experimental railgun technology from Aberdeen.
His superiors had looked the other way, the old men who weren’t healthy enough to go to space, and who’d been pushed aside for the kids from Operation Brightstar.
The ships themselves had been easy enough to get. The museum personnel had been glad to hand them over; they understood what they were about, and longed to see them in action again. Many had spent countless hours readying them for storage, and teaching the old systems to new blood, or integrating Invy tech into 1980s electrical systems.
They landed just outside Bremerton, flying nap-of-the-earth to avoid Invy ground-based sensors. Rotor wash flattened out the pine trees around the old landing pad, made to look like a patch of exposed bedrock, causing the new radio mast to sway. Helped down by Cryer and another SEAL, Admiral Larken, belying his age, moved swiftly to the now open camouflaged door, past another two guards, and followed steps downward into the dimness. Even as his eyes grew used to the light, his ears heard a rushing, roaring, echoing sound coming up the stairwell, and he pushed the last door up.
Before him a platform opened up into a vast manmade cavern, almost a thousand feet long and about the same across. It was rapidly filling with seawater from hidden pumps, and men maneuvered hoses across the four enormous shapes, working slowly back from the bows.
He knew their hull designations by heart, and smiled with pleasure as he saw the first of the giant white numbers appear from under the rapidly disintegrating nano-crete. “64”, his old ship, the Missouri. Her sisters soon appeared, New Jersey, Wisconsin, then the Iowa, each in turn seeming to shake off the supporting foam-based preservative and seeking their homes in the seawater that was slowly flowing under them, filling the drydocks.
“Oh, yes,” he whispered. “Oh my Lord, yes indeed.” And Rear Admiral Jonas Larken, the last man to command a US Navy battleship, and the first to command a CEF battleship division, cried tears of joy.
