Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  The absence of fanatical opposition was puzzling.

  They broke into a large room and found…nothing. There was a desk, one suitable for a human, and a set of human flags, but no sign of humans, apart from a note on the desk. He pointed his automated translator at it; it produced a translation after some thought – ‘we’ll be back.’

  Warag almost collapsed in shock. If the MemeKill stereotype wasn't holding true – and it normally did, because that was why it was a stereotype – what had happened? Just what had they encountered on Earth? Part of his mind whispered an answer; aliens…

  For the first time, he understood what that meant.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Quartered Safe Out Here

  United States National Command Centre, USA

  The stealth helicopter ghosted over the forest in the dead of night.

  President Cardona looked up from his seat as it came in to land on what looked like a deserted forest clearing, landing with nary a bump. Captain Schaefer moved quickly as the hatch opened; his men spilled out, secured the area, and then invited Cardona to hustle down a path towards an old logging cabin. Inside the cabin, they were met by more guards, who insisted on checking everyone’s identity before opening a hatch in the floor, revealing yet another tunnel.

  The President’s lips twitched. He was getting sick of tunnels.

  A small underground train waited for them; they boarded it and it sped off into the darkness. Several minutes passed in the dark tunnel before the train came to a halt, passing through a set of blast doors before finally stopping at a small guard station. A man wearing a Colonel’s uniform waited for them as they disembarked; the President liked him on sight. He had an air of solid reassuring competence and confidence surrounding him.

  “Mr. President, my name is Colonel Travis,” the officer said. He shook Cordona’s hand after saluting. “Welcome to the National Command Centre.”

  Captain Schaefer seemed to relax slightly as they headed up a long flight of stairs. The President understood; if the aliens were able to land and occupy the National Command Centre, the war was as good as lost, at least the American part of the war. He wondered, again, how the rest of the world was coping; any nation with a seacoast, and that included all of the Great Powers, was likely to be in real trouble even without the aliens landing and seizing territory. Assistance from Russia or China was likely to be impossible…

  “The complex actually isn’t that large,” Travis said, as they entered the ground floor. It was designed like the bunker under Washington; a set of consoles, operated by grim-faced officers in uniform, with a set of large screens displaying images from hundreds of sensors and cameras scattered all over America. Despite the best efforts of the ACLU, the entire country had been covered in sensors watching for Wreckers; at the moment, Cardona was more than relieved they existed. He almost flinched back from an image of one of the aliens, holding a toy-like gun and marching forwards towards an unseen sensor. “Most of it is buried deep under this mountain; it would take a major series of KEW strikes to expose and damage us, or the infrastructure we have created here over the years to provide command and control functions for the nation in a time of danger.”

  He waved a hand around the complex. “We actually have liaison officers and representatives from most federal organisations, including the State Police and the FBI, in the complex,” he continued. “That gives us an unmatched ability to gather intelligence on what might have caused any problem and how we should respond to it, subject to the President’s approval, of course. The small defence force, a company of Marines, have barracks and other facilities in the lower level of the complex; Captain Schaefer, you and your men are welcome to use them to refresh yourself and prepare for future deployment against the aliens.”

  Captain Schaefer nodded and dismissed most of the platoon. “I was ordered to remain with the President,” he said, and determinedly stuck with him. Colonel Travis didn’t argue. “How safe is this complex?”

  Colonel Travis didn’t question his right to know. “We’re supposed to be completely unknown to anyone not cleared to know,” he said. “The odds are that the Russians and the Chinese have a vague idea where we are; the complex has been up and running for the last thirty years and that really means that some eagle-eyed Chinese recon officer might have put a picture together, over time. The aliens are unlikely to be able to spot us from orbit; we’re not radiating anything that might attract their attention to this location. The only real danger is that they might capture someone cleared to know about this base in Washington; there were at least seven, not counting yourselves, within the city when the aliens landed.”

  He opened the door to a small conference room; Cardona smiled when he saw General Bark and Admiral Oshiro waiting for him. He ignored their salutes and shook both their hands; his grin only grew wider when the Secretary of State, Janet Richardson, and the National Security Advisor, Casper Henderson, entered. They both looked relieved to see him; they had had to maintain radio silence as they fled east and there had been no way to inform them that he was in fact alive until they reached the landing zone. He clasped their hands as they came over to him, feeling as if there was no longer anything that could stop them; they’d stopped running, and now there was a chance to formulate a plan to hit back.

  “Mr. President,” Jessie said. He nodded and took the seat she had indicated for him; it seemed as if Jessie was going to give the briefing herself, rather than leaving it to a more junior officer to handle. That invariably meant bad news. The display blinked to life; every time she spoke, it focused in on a particular image or list of updates, such as they were. The chaos had scattered the entire defence force along the eastern seaboard. “As you know, America has been invaded by the aliens – the Oghaldzon” – her voice stumbled over the strange human attempt to pronounce an alien word – “if we take their broadcast seriously – along with four other locations around the world. The first battles were very costly…and, I regret to say, we lost.”

  Cardona heard the bitterness in her tone and winced; the Oghaldzon were likely to regret ever meeting her.

  “Apart from the landing in Virginia and Maryland, they landed in four other locations; southern France and northern Spain, Egypt, south of Moscow and near Karachi, but with landings heading in the direction of Delhi,” she continued. “That means that four out of seven Great Powers have been targeted; tidal waves and the asteroid impact caused serious damage in China and Japan. Our information is very sparse, Mr. President, but the senior Chinese officer we have been able to talk to told us that the entire country was in chaos. We haven’t been able to get in touch with Beijing at all; there may be some remains of the government, or the aliens might have destroyed it. There’s no way to know.

  “Japan was hit badly by tidal waves, hitting almost all of their cities and killing millions,” she said. “We believe that every nation involved in the Co-Prosperity Sphere was struck, with Korea coming off the best, and Japan, Taiwan, and the various Indonesian islands coming off the worst. They may have lost more than two-thirds of their population, Mr. President; we can certainly expect very limited help from them.”

  The map changed again, revealing the Middle East and Europe. “We have much better information from the Caliphate and the Europeans,” Jessie continued. “Tidal waves struck the Caliphate and much of Europe’s west coast; every city along there, including Mecca and Medina, got drenched. Europe got off lightly, comparatively; Ireland was struck, along with parts of France, Spain and the surrounding areas, but the heartland was more or less untouched. The long-term effects, however, are likely to cause the deaths of thousands more; the Caliphate, in particular, had created thousands of kilometres of farmland in Arabia and Iraq. Between the waves and the massive rainfall, the farmland is likely to be destroyed, causing mass starvation. They’ll have to set up algae farms; it was such a boost for them when they shut them all down, and now they’ll have to reopen them.”

  Cardona tapped the table, unw
illing to listen any more to the details. The scale of the disaster was too large for him to cope with, for anyone to cope with. All the Great Powers had been hit and weakened badly by the asteroids alone, and the aliens had landed to make their victory certain. He had to pull a victory out of it…and he could see no way to win, unless Area 51 could pull off a miracle.

  “That’s a matter for another time,” he said. He forced his voice to remain flat. “What is the current military situation in America?”

  Jessie nodded once and altered the display. “Washington has fallen,” she said, flatly. “So far, the aliens haven’t discovered the bunker; we hope to bring out the handful of remaining vital personnel and insert combat troops as soon as possible, but for the moment, the situation on the ground is way too confused to allow us to do much more than regroup and prepare for the next stage. At the last report, our troops were regrouping at several different locations, carefully spread out to avoid drawing notice from orbiting spies. Mr. President, I cannot make that clear enough; every time they see a tank, they smash it from orbit. We can hurt the aliens; as yet, we cannot push them into the sea.”

  The display focused in on one of the alien landing craft. “The USSF experts I talked to believe that the aliens cannot take off again,” Jessie said. “Just how they intend to move their soldiers around the world is something of a mystery; we studied the concept of orbital insertion, but never really figured out a way of overcoming the inherent limitations. The aliens have solved them by the simple expedient of using fusion drives to land…and they cannot leave. They have to win, or die; those craft are just too heavy to make orbit.

  “And, so far, they’re winning,” she continued grimly. “Their main weapons appear to be lasers and a handful of other directed energy weapons, including something that caused very limited fission in the target, causing a massive explosion. They have hover tanks and hover bikes – both concepts we studied and rejected because they were too complex for the battlefield – and they are capable of moving at astonishing speed. We seem to have the advantage in house-to-house fighting – the aliens are much less agile than we are – but if they find an impossible target, they strike it from orbit. They don’t seem to be very good at detecting Shadows and other stealth aircraft, but they’re learning…and everything that doesn’t have stealth is dead if it tries to fly near them. Worst of all, they’ve inflicted serious damage on our network of bases and ships across the world; most of the USN and the other global world navies have been destroyed from orbit. The stealth ships and submarines, again, have been spared, although we have lost several to the tidal waves; one stealth ship was far too close to the impact in the Atlantic to possibly survive. With your permission, I have ordered one of the Pacific Fleet ships to visit China and try to find out what’s happening; it’s quite possible that we have a sixth alien invasion force somewhere in China and we wouldn’t know about it until too late.”

  She paused. “Overall, the situation is grim,” she concluded. “We can bleed the aliens, hurt them, but we cannot concentrate our forces for several weeks to hit them back. We also know very little about what is happening with the other invasion forces; information is almost completely lacking.”

  The President wanted to put his head in his hands. There was no time to show any weakness. “What about the civilian population?”

  Jessie looked at Secretary of State Richardson, who looked unhappy. “It’s bad,” she said, “but not as bad as we feared across most of the country. It’s worst in Latin America, where the tidal waves caused significant damage, but the mountains provided shelter for large numbers and local army units provided security for the civil population. In the long-term, there will be massive shortages of food and shelter, as well as a dangerous disease environment caused by rotting bodies, but we could deal with that – provided, of course, that the aliens didn’t interfere. The interior of the old United States is much less hit; we have been setting up refugee camps and working hard to evacuate people from the path of the alien advance. Not everyone has been willing to leave; we have reports of individuals remaining behind to take pot shots at the aliens.”

  She looked up. “In the long term, however, we are looking at a major disaster…another major disaster, I should say,” she continued. Her face was very pale; she held Cardona’s eyes in a death grip. “The national economy has collapsed, more or less completely, and martial law exists in large parts of the country. If it wasn't for the algae farms, we wouldn’t be able to feed the refugees; even so, there has already been some resistance to FEMA officials trying to requisition food supplies from farms for the refugees. Some places are pulling together and helping people, other places are trying to seal themselves off from the refugees, or worse. It’s going to get worse before it gets better…

  “But even that is not the worst,” she concluded. “We are dependent upon supplies of Helium-3 from the moon and Jupiter to fuel the fusion plants scattered around the country. We intended to build a reserve to last six months; at the moment, we can roughly ensure that the supplies lasted for half of that, assuming that the aliens didn’t interfere with the supplies and their transports, and they almost certainly would. There are only a handful of power plants that are not dependent upon Helium-3…and all of them together can’t supply everything we would need, even under ideal conditions. In short, Mr. President, within three months at most, the lights will go out right across the country.”

  Cardona rubbed his eyes. “I see,” he said. “Is there any way that we can prevent the disaster from happening somehow? Other supplies we can tap?”

  Richardson shook her head. “There are no other sources of supply that would make economic sense,” she said. “It never really took off until we had secure supply lines from the moon, and later the gas giants. As long as the aliens continue to blockade us, we will be unable to refuel the power plants, or establish new ones. We can work to set up some alternatives – there were developments in solar cells, for example, that never took off because of Helium-3 – but we cannot cover the entire country in the time we have left. The best we can advise is rationing power as much as possible, only transmitting power to essential uses, but that could cause considerable unrest…and the aliens hacked up some parts of the power distribution network. There are places in the country that have power, places that don’t, and no obvious reason why the aliens had treated them in such a manner.”

  The President looked over at Admiral Oshiro. “Is there no way that we can get supplies through the blockade anyway?”

  “Blockade-running is always a complicated process,” Oshiro said. “At present, the answer is almost certainly that we can’t; the moon, for example, normally launches capsules of Helium-3 via mass driver, which were then scooped out of space and parachuted down to Earth. We could fit a capsule so that it could make the trip through the atmosphere without support, but it would be difficult to do it without it being detected and shot at from orbit. There might be some possibilities, and my office has teams working on them now, but as long as the aliens are using active sensors in orbit, sneaking anything through the blockade would become almost impossible. There are a handful of possibilities, but…”

  He shrugged. “We also don’t have much in the way of communications with the moon,” he continued. “Radio is out; the aliens keep jamming it. Laser communications were largely dependent upon relay stations, which the aliens destroyed…apart from one, a Chinese station that we have managed to take over for a short period. The Chinese codes that they gave us are due to expire pretty soon and there’s no one we can ask for the next set of codes. I have the NSA trying to crack the codes, but if we make a mistake, the entire system will shut down. Direct communications are somewhat limited; we would have to try to organise it without perfect communications and no way of enforcing what we asked.”

  Cardona stared at him. “You are suggesting that they would refuse?”

  “Any missions launched along those lines would either be a waste of time or suicide,�
�� Oshiro said grimly. “We can ask, but I strongly recommend that we don’t try to force the issue, not now. Lunar politics are volatile enough at the best of times and this is hardly the best of times; some lunar politicians will see it as a chance to make their independence stick.”

  The President composed himself. “We have two problems then,” he said. “We have to get rid of the aliens, at least kick them off American soil, and we have to rebuild as much of the country as possible. Can we do that?”

  Oshiro shrugged. “We have to wait for Area 51 to produce the fleet and use it against the aliens,” he said. “If we can take them out of orbit, our victory is certain; without it, we might manage to hammer, maybe even destroy, the force on the surface, but there would be no hope of turning that into a real victory. We need time, Mr. President; we need enough time to prepare properly and take the offensive against the aliens. Only then can we win.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Ten Things You Would Rather Not Know

  Seeker for Truth, Earth Orbit

  Oolane-Researcher-Seeker studied the two humans through the pickups before chiming the hatch’s sensors, allowing them slight warning of her entrance. The humans hadn’t changed much; they either spent their time talking, or trying to sleep. The researchers had recorded their conversation and analysed it; much of it had rotated around their possible fate at the hands of the Oghaldzon, or occasionally around mating. They hadn’t mated, as far as the Oghaldzon could tell, but perhaps they were moving closer towards it; the female had stopped trying to hide herself from the male, and the male had grown more comfortable with the female – perhaps. It was easy to remember they were aliens; their expressions could quite easily be ones of eternal hatred, or even madness.