Thunder & Lightning

by Christopher Nuttall

  The ground-based defences fared differently. Unable to take part in the defence of the space-based systems, the ground-based lasers and plasma cannon found themselves designated to shoot down or deflect a hail of incoming missiles and long-range shells. They fired as quickly as they could, and shells began to die as they were picked off by the defences, but many of the missiles had been fitted with seeker heads that homed in on the weapons and the radar stations supporting their engagement. Some of them were hit as the missiles found their targets and struck without being intercepted, others rapidly reprioritised and engaged weapons targeting them specifically, abandoning almost all of the alien complexes to their fate. The hail of shells started to slack off as orbital platforms started to use KEWs– useless against the Russians – against the human gunners, but the coverage and defence had been seriously decimated by the onslaught.

  For a brief shining moment, the human race held the advantage.

  * * *

  Captain Wilbur Hawking brought his Shadow in barely above the waves of Chesapeake Bay, trusting to luck and his superb flying skills to keep the plane from being struck by a wave top. The Atlantic had been starting to settle down after the asteroid, although he’d seen signs that there were plenty of dead fish in the water, floating on the surface. It almost made him smile; it was something that would put the eco-terrorists and their concerns in the proper perspective. The human race had never inflicted so much damage on Earth as the aliens had in that one horrific moment.

  Washington had been surrounded by alien defences, enough radar and passive sensors to pick up a Shadow, and enough lasers and other ground-based systems to ensure that the imprudent Shadow would be brought down. Hawking had wanted to refuse the order when he’d seen some of the updated data; only his own confidence in his own skills and the cold knowledge that one of the other pilots would carry it out if he didn’t – or die trying – had kept him from planning the mission. It was real seat-of-the-pants flying, much like every other mission since the aliens had arrived; he was going to fly right up the Potomac and strike his targets before the aliens realised he was even there.

  As he entered the mouth of the river, flying as fast as he dared and moving from side to side as threats and dangers – beached boats, damaged bridges – presented themselves, he evaded all of them with speed and skill. It was dangerous as hell, but despite his concerns, he found himself loving the mission and the challenge it gave him. The aliens had manned and defended Washington with their people and technology, but would they expect that someone would be insane enough to actually fly up the river, under most of their defences, and hit them right where they lived?

  Hawking hoped not. The aliens fought well, but so far they hadn’t fought like mad bastards. He’d faced Wreckers.

  The damage only grew worse as he flew closer, keeping low and glancing down from time to time at his threat indicator, wondering what would happen when the aliens reacted to the incoming swarm of missiles. If the plan worked, the aliens would have everything pointing west, where the missiles were coming from, overlapping all of their active sensors – with perhaps just a few exceptions – to find, track, and destroy all of the shells and missiles that would be heading towards them. If the plan worked, and it was a very, very, big if, he could carry out his mission, reverse course, and flash out of the combat zone before the aliens had a chance to react. If the plan didn’t work, he was dead.

  The threat indicator updated rapidly as the aliens started to pulse more radar pulses towards the west, their lasers and plasma weapons lighting up the skies as they fired at incoming threats. Hawking had to admire their dedication; the weapons they had linked together formed an almost impenetrable network. If the USAF didn’t have its handful of stealth aircraft, it would have been wiped out by now… what had survived the alien attack from orbit. Every USAF base that had even looked remotely like a USAF base had been hit; he’d been lucky that his own base hadn’t been struck. It would have rendered his life impossible; they’d probably have given him a gun and sent him to the front lines.

  He checked the onboard map; intelligence had somehow – he hadn’t dared ask how – developed an up-to-date map of Washington, including ruined buildings and alien facilities. It made him angry; he didn’t know if the aliens had started to build their facilities on the remains of the human city as a kind of "fuck you" message, or if they had merely done it because Washington was a city and they felt they should build their cities on it, but he wanted to wipe them all out for that crime. He altered course slightly, drawing in his breath; a mistake now would prove fatal. He swept away from the river and rose up, heading right for his targets.

  The Donkeys had put up their buildings with astonishing speed; they were strange and wonderful to behold, like something out of that porno movie set back in the days of the Aztecs. He saw, briefly, aliens; not scantily-clad young human women, but the deer-like Donkeys as they glanced up at him, their strange evil eyes looking at him and seeing… he wondered what they saw. He saw a nude human woman quickly, so quickly he wondered if he had imagined it, as he rose over the building and his targets came in sight. A strange calm overwhelmed him as he selected his weapons…and fired.

  The Shadow seemed to leap once as the two heavy bombs fell away, heading right towards the alien barracks, whose defences were already turning to engage the bombs. He’d been told that the bombs had been designed to be tough; alien lasers would have real problems destroying them ahead of time. He watched as he yanked the plane around; the first bomb struck its target and detonated, the second followed it in seconds later. Two huge explosions threw debris and flames into the air, and he knew that hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Donkeys had just died. He wanted to shout at them, but professionalism kept him focused on the mission; he still had to get out of the area before the aliens locked onto his craft and…

  Everyone’s luck runs out sooner or later. An alien ground-based laser had a lucky shot and took it, slicing off the wing of the Shadow. Before Hawking could react, or even eject, the plane wobbled violently, tipped, and crashed into a third alien building. He died before his mind had even realised that he had taken one last swipe at the aliens who had desecrated his world.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine: Counterattack, Take Three

  Near Washington, DC

  There was no "go" signal.

  Captain Christopher Fardell hadn’t expected one; the signal to start the advance and close the distance between themselves and the aliens had been the sound of the guns opening fire. It made more than a little sense; the US Army might not have been used to conducting what were effectively insurgency tactics in its own backyard, but it had studied those techniques extensively. The aliens had overwhelming space power; the only hope for survival, let alone doing anything effective, was to hit them and remain as close to the aliens as possible. They couldn’t call down fire on their own people.

  The battlesuits advanced slowly, crawling forward as they advanced, remaining as low as possible. The suits had been designed to be stealthy – learning to hide from American-built drones had been one of the first lessons the original battlesuits had taught the other Americans – and they emitted almost nothing at all, but a sharp-eyed alien might pick them out visually. Their sonar gave them an unfair advantage; the strange parsing of the alien sonar would allow them to literally see through some cover, and perhaps detect the presence of the humans by the hardness of the suits. They made almost no noise as they crept closer to the alien outpost, but all it would take was one sound in the wrong place and the aliens would know that they were coming.

  The aliens had spread out a perimeter from their occupied areas, herding the human citizens – those who remained in their path – into camps, or sometimes allowing refugees to flee the area. There seemed to be no obvious reason why they had allowed some civilians to flee but not others, but at least it looked as if they didn’t simply massacre civilians wherever they found them. If they had been fighting on even terms, Fardell would almost h
ave welcomed the aliens; they were far more… decent… opponents than the Wreckers. The thought made him shiver; what would the Wreckers do in an alien-dominated world? Would the entire human race end up as Wreckers, using terrorism and desperate slaughter of innocents and guilty alike to fight the aliens to the last breath? It wasn’t a reassuring thought.

  The alien camp rose up ahead of them, a simple structure that had been established in the remains of a small town, somewhere far away enough from Washington to allow hard-working office-dwellers the conceit that they lived in the countryside while commuting to Washington each day. Fardell’s own father had lived in a teleconference block at first; he had been given a small flat by the company, which he had almost never left while working. The advantages of not living in the increasingly rough and violent Chicago, he’d explained to his son, had not been great enough to make up for the lack of a social life; it had taken an accident to bring him face to face with the woman he had married and later produced a few children with, including Chris Fardell himself. He had wondered if that had placed a strain on the marriage; there had been no hatred, no affair, one day, his parents had just… separated. They were still friends, they still talked, but something was missing.

  He forced himself back to the present as he used hand signals to order the nine soldiers to spread out. They didn’t dare use microburst transmissions so close to the aliens; it might have triggered an alarm. He glanced through the remote sensor an insurgent had placed somewhere near, high up a tree, and saw the alien tanks, along with the patrols walking slowly around the edges of the camp. The aliens didn’t use a routine, he noted with a moment of grudging respect; if there was a pattern to their movements, he couldn’t make it out despite a determined study of their actions. Routines, he had been taught, bred complacency; by now, the aliens had learned not to be complacent on Earth.

  He saw the alien movements before Browning motioned, pointing it out; the alien tanks and stranger vehicles, some of them very alien, others almost human, were starting to move out. The aliens had to know that they were under attack; they might either believe that their base was a target – it wasn’t – or they might intend to block any possible advance on foot. The aliens had had time to scout the entire area; it was quite possible that they had left enough sensors scattered around to pick up on one of the advancing companies of light infantry… or even that they had seen Fardell and his men taking up their positions. They would have engaged them, surely, if they had known they were there?

  “Aliens,” he muttered under his breath. Most Wreckers were predicable; most other human militaries worked from the same playbook. The aliens might not even have read the tactical manuals that would-be officers studied, they might have entirely different ideas on what constituted a successful defence tactic, or even how many losses they were prepared to soak up before going scorched earth. “Who knows what those inscrutable Donkeys are thinking?”

  There was nothing slow about the aliens; they advanced forward, their tanks gliding out with all the confidence of invulnerable vehicles, certain that they couldn’t be hurt. Under the circumstances that had prevailed during the first two rounds of fighting, they would have been right; plasma cannons had been detected and often destroyed before they could fire a single shot – but now, however, the humans had adapted. The small launcher Fardell carried in one hand held a plasma missile; an antitank weapon system that was rarely deployed in combat, and should come as a total surprise to the aliens.

  He made hand signals quickly; take aim and sound off silently. He had the lead target; the other soldiers would take theirs as they appeared, preparing to fire. Plasma missiles weren't rare because they were unreliable; they were rare because under normal circumstances, it was much more efficient for the battlesuits to carry plasma cannon instead of one-shot missile systems. The aliens had foreclosed that option, however; he intended to use the older system to give them a kick in the pants. He could hear the faint whine of the alien tanks as they moved closer…

  “Fire!” he barked. Any closer and the aliens would have seen them. Still, they reacted with impressive speed; even as the first missile went raging towards its target, the aliens turned and returned fire with their laser weapons. They didn’t seem to be shooting at the missiles; he saw fire spreading through the trees before his missile struck the tank and detonated, releasing an impressive burst of brilliant white light, almost a physical thing against the dark bitumen. The illusion vanished as something went BANG; the blast almost knocked him over, end for end. The other missiles had found their targets; he yelled in delight as the entire alien reaction force was wiped out.

  “Sir, we have more alien movement in the base,” Fredrickson said. Fardell nodded; no one, apart from the most incompetent group of Wreckers, would leave a base empty unless there was no hope at all of defending it. “Communications is warning of heavy alien forces forming up and preparing to repel attack.”

  “Got ya,” Fardell snapped. He grinned as he barked orders to the team; the base would be attacked and reduced to rubble before the aliens even knew what had hit them. “Move!”

  Browning’s voice echoed through the communications link. “Sir, request permission to use our special weapon,” he said. The sounds of explosions and human firing grew louder; Fardell could see flashes of light in the sky as alien point defence weapons found their targets. “We might not have much more time.”

  “Granted,” Fardell snapped, issuing orders as the battlesuits advanced. They’d gotten the Donkeys off balance, but how long would that last? “Stomp them flat!”

  Music began to play. Browning had been a student of older forms of music; he had suggested that they should go to the battle under a deafening noise, perhaps blinding the alien sonar. There was no way to know for sure, but if the music touched whatever frequency the aliens used for their sonar, they would be having one hell of a headache. It might just give the humans the edge, even though Fardell would have preferred to march to war under a more conventional tune.

  “Everybody clap your hands

  Get on up and dance

  We're gonna stomp all night now

  Everybody move your feet

  Get up and feel the beat

  We're gonna stomp all night…”

  * * *

  As it happened, Browning had been only half right; the music didn’t touch the actual levels of sonar except at very faint moments, but the deafening noise made it much harder for the Oghaldzon to think clearly. The racket didn’t interfere with the sonar, because the sonar receptors on each of the Oghaldzon could pick out the sonar pulses from the sudden torrent of background noise, but it did affect their ability to hear orders from their officers. If they tried to use their sonar to talk, they lost the ability to use it to see; if they tried to click to one another, they found that their orders were lost in the chaos.

  Warag-Soldier-Infantry had been sleeping when the human attack began, after the unit had returned from a patrol of the surrounding area where they had repelled a small raid by human soldiers, or, as he was starting to suspect, a chance encounter that had surprised both sides equally. The human terrain was so different to any ground they were used to that it was unpleasant and dangerous, but they were learning; the unit had wiped out the human force for no losses of its own. The high whine of the alarm brought him to his feet, weapons already in hand, as the first explosions released blinding light and deafening noise into the air. He blinked rapidly, his eyes moving to try to wipe the glare out of the half-useless organs, and heard the sound of gunshots overhead, along with the faint noise of Oghaldzon laser weapons. His unit had started to rush out when the… noise… had started. His translator couldn’t make anything useful from it, even if individual words were recognisable…

  “All I need is the music

  To get me high

  Feeling so alive

  Leaving all my cares behind

  Keep doing your own thing

  And I'll keep doing mine

 
Dancing through the night

  This where I feel alright…”

  Warag reached up one forearm and rubbed at his receptors, trying to push the noise out of them by sheer physical force. It didn’t work; his head was already starting to hurt because of the sheer effort of filtering out the human noise from the other sounds, none of which were audible over the level of the racket. The Oghaldzon heard several frequencies that humans were deaf to, and vice versa, but this racket seemed to be audible on all levels; he could barely hear himself think. He didn’t normally have to concentrate to focus his sonar, or his hearing; now he had the feeling that only his eyes would keep him alive through the next few moments.

  He snatched up a pair of earpieces and slotted them into his receptors, relaying on the inbuilt audio-discrimination systems to keep filtering out the strange alien input, almost sighing in relief when the noise dimmed. Earpieces were disliked by the Oghaldzon because they dampened sonar; even though they were meant to allow the sonar pulses to pass through, it was as if the pulses had suddenly been reduced in range enough to almost blind them. The constant barrage of noise was nothing like the sounds of a battle; those could be filtered out with ease, unlike the racket pouring in on him now.

  They stumbled out of their barracks just in time to see the main gate explode inwards as the humans concentrated their firepower on it. Warag used hand signals from four of his arms to order the unit to spread out and return fire, hoping that support would arrive before the humans punched through the thin line and smashed his force. Judging from the limited number of tiny projectiles the humans were shooting into the camp, there would be no time for any support; the humans would kill them all before it arrived. He saw – not sensed, saw – a human figure diving behind a building; lasers from three of his unit’s members burned through the human building and incinerated the human form. The ground shook, time and time again, and he found himself starting to push the unit back, wondering if they could disperse into the surrounding area and make it back to safe territory…