by Rob Buckman
“Funny you should ask that.” Walking over to the corner, Decker grabbed his ‘Bergen’ and brought it back to the table. He fished around inside for a moment and pulled out a wrapped package. “One of the items my Commander let me bring with me was this.” Decker unwrapped the cloth and showed her what was inside.
“Right, a dead bird, what…” Decker pressed the bird’s beak, and it came to life and sat up. “Oh, my lord.” Decker let out a laugh.
“It’s a drone disguised to look like a bird.”
“Damn! You are full of surprises. How long will it fly?”
“About an hour on batteries, all day in the sunlight. It’s solar powered. But.” He hesitated.
“But?”
“I have no idea what detection equipment these UMF have, or how close ‘betty’ can fly before she’s spotted. I only have two, and don’t want to waste one.” The bird, or ‘betty’, looked like a small hawk, and even close-up looked convincing, right down to the imitation feathers. It even sat there turning its head as if looking at them.
“It takes off; lands and flies like a real bird, even to the point of avoiding other birds and obstacles in its way.” Decker put his arm out as he would with a real bird, and it hopped on. “Let's go outside and let's see how she flies.”
CHAPTER EIGHT: TROJAN HORSE GAMBIT
Secreted just inside the tree line along the road rather than the top of the ridge, Decker and Delta Team looked out onto the clearing beside the interstate and the alien firebase. The aliens were smart enough to place the firebase on a choke point at the junction of 178 and Elizabeth Norris road. Decker launched the drone from the town, and set it on a circular holding pattern, five hundred feet above the base, until he got into position. He used Delta team as a stand in for his spotter while he concentrated on flying the drone. While he did, he was at his most vulnerable, due to the loss of situational awareness. His spotter would act as over watch around them, so he could concentrate on what he was doing.
The half visor in his helmet was now a split screen, and he had a bird's-eye view of the ground passing below, and a view of the surrounding space through the ‘birds’ eyes. The hard-wired program would stop it flying into trees, hills or other obstacles. In this case the surrounding mountains. The tiny belly camera gave him a downward view, but even this he could angle forty-five degrees in any direction. He set the automatic circular pattern to close in on the base, but kept it high, just in case. If the ‘bird’ didn’t draw any attention as it got closer, he might fly lower if he couldn’t get a good look from this altitude. Never the trusting sort, what concerned him more was what was going on around him, as with inexperienced people, there was no telling what they might miss. Decker managed to resist the urge to pull back and look around him.
In daylight, the inside of the base didn’t show much, a collection of what looked like white painted portable housing units, or containers, lined up against three walls as Burrole reported, and as he’d seen before. The ordinary looking forty-foot containers were lined up to leave a cleared area in the center. He could see several beings walking around the inside perimeter fence, but at this distance couldn’t distinguish much detail. He tried to imitate a real bird, by banking and flying across the compound, gradually getting lower. At two hundred feet, he started the lazy circles again, but there was still no reaction. Now he could get a closer look, and grunted in surprise. As he’d predicted, once inside the walls of the base, the aliens felt safe. None wore the protective armor, or facemasks he saw those on the road wearing, and none of them carried anything that looked like a weapon. In appearance, they looked humanoid, in that they had two arms, two legs, walked upright, and covered in a green exoskeleton, rather like giant insects, or ants.
He banked the bird to see if he could get a better look at their faces, and was rewarded by seeing a wasp like face. They had a short snout, with a pair of large, insect mandibles for eating, and large, multi-faceted, forward-looking eyes of a hunter. A five-foot high cockroach or ant was the best description he could come up with, but not surprising really, seeing they weren’t of terrestrial origin. As he watched, a taller alien walked out from one of the buildings, but this one was covered in an iridescent blue caprice and wore a short cape. The way the short, green ones acted around him, Decker was betting this one was in charge. To one side, several smaller, light green aliens moved in and out of the containers doing something, but completely ignoring what was happening around them.
“Destroyer coming.” Krista Jackson murmured. Decker banked the bird away, just as a real bird would when a larger bird showed up, seeing the Destroyer come to a hover above the camp.
It waited a moment before landing in the center of the base to give the ones on the ground time to get out of the way. Bringing the drone around in a tight circle, he watched with interest as a ramp at the rear end lowered, and a tall, yellow skinned, hairless humanoid alien stepped out. This one wore a shimmering silver body suit and a cloak, and from what he could see of the face, it was flat, and almost featureless. It had no ears, and the nose was nothing more than two vertical slits and a slight bump above a small, lipless mouth.
The way the other aliens were kneeling and bowing, even the blue one, this guy had to be an overseer, as after some sort of conversation, the shorter one with the iridescent blue caprice turned his head and said something. One of the dark green aliens ran off, and a few minutes later came back with a bunch of light green grunts, as Decker thought of them. They immediately rushed over to the shuttle and started unloading long flat boxes from the craft. In all, they unloaded twenty boxes and carefully stacked them inside one of the container like buildings, pointing up the fact they were probably storage sheds. If they could get inside a few of the buildings to investigate, so much the better. Beside the long boxes, they unloaded several crates, but these they just stacked against the side of the building, obviously not as important, nor in need of protection like the long flat boxes. The dark green grunts unloaded a dozen star shaped silvery objects and stacked them near another shed. They didn’t look that heavy, and he wondered why they hadn’t used the light green ones to unload them. After that, and a lot more kneeling and bowing, the tall yellow alien entered the ship, and it took off.
Oddly, the craft climbed rapidly into the sky, heading south instead of going back on patrol. This suggested it was a supply ship ferrying something down from orbit. With this few alien soldiers in the base, whatever they were ferrying down had to be important, rather than just normal supplies and equipment. It was also clear; these people had anti-gravity, which gave them the ability to land their craft just about anywhere. Decker puzzled about what the star shaped objects might be, until one of the aliens came over to them with a control unit in his claw like hands. He fiddled around with the controls for a few second, then stood back. The moment he did, the SUV sized star lifted off the ground and hovered about four feet in the air. Drones. That was surprise enough until he realized the unit didn’t have any ducted fans or lift motors from what he could see.
“I’ll be damned. These things have anti-grav units, or mag-lift.”
“What?” Krista asked. Decker forgot she couldn’t see what he was seeing.
“The UFMs have anti-grav drones, and from the look of it, so do their ships."
"It would answer why we don’t hear the… well to us, the sound of jet engines or fan motors.”
“That puzzled me as well, and the question of fuel.” Decker looked at her for a long moment before nodding.
“No need for fuel depots.”
“That change the equation any for us?” She asked.
“Not really. We still have to avoid them wherever possible. I’m betting they’re search drones are equipped with better scanning, or sensor equipment than the destroyers, and able to linger on target as long as they want, eyes in the sky just like ‘Betty’.”
“Oh, like the news helicopter over an accident scene. Right.” She murmured.
“Right and not
a good thing for us.”
“Unless they are still looking for bipedal, upright humanoid beings.”
“Yeah, but these might be able to pick up on our weapons. Sheep and cattle don’t usually carry the fire power we do.” It still came down to whether or not the aliens could differentiate between animal and human. With the amount of scattered metal, abandoned cars, and what have you, they still might not be able to distinguish human from animal, even if they were carrying. Who knew, to them it might be normal.
While they talked, Decker set 'Betty' on a random course back to town, where it would land just like a bird, and shut down. He thought about the firebase, and if they should take it, or try to find a way around. The longer they stayed here the more danger there was of being seen or attacked. Attacking came with a number of risks, the least of which was letting the UMFs know there were armed humans in the vicinity. The second question was how to get into the firebase in the first place. For that, he needed to have another talk with his prisoners.
“I’m sure this device is something like those RF security tags you see on clothing at a department store, but what if this electronic tag is tied in with the person’s bio signature, what then?” Doc Mason offered.
“Damn! I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Or it could be the device is powered off the body. I have no problem skinning this guy, dead or alive, but it wouldn’t do you much good trying to walk in there to test the theory if it needs to be attached to a live body to work. You’d be dead.” Decker gave her a dark look, but she was right. He didn’t dare risk any of the girl’s lives on his hair-brained scheme if she was right.
“So where does that leave us? Were stuck here with no way to get by, unless we want to back track and try another road, or climb all over the bloody mountains.” He looked around his command post, seeing glum looks.
“What was your impression of the aliens?” She asked, seeing Decker shake his head, watching the video replay on Decker’s map-pad.
“From what I saw, not much different from bees or ants. Theirs is a hieratical society and from what I saw, the light and dark green aliens are the grunts, foot soldiers, workers or what have you. The blue guys are the next level, like a sergeant. The yellow guys are probably officers, is about the best way to describe them. Of course, that only a rough analogy and it’s probably a lot more complicated than that. It fits the pattern of a conquering alien race, not much further along the development track than us.”
“I don’t follow, Doc?”
“As a Doctor, I sometimes have… had a lot of free time on my hands, so I did a lot of reading, you know scientific journals, articles on this and that, but I’ll tell you a secret. I also read a lot of science fiction.” She smiled. “Not something a proper lady is supposed to read.”
“And what were you supposed to read?” He asked with a grin.
“Oh, the classics, medical journals, medical updates, philosophy, things like that, but I did all that in my youth at college and it bored me silly, so I started reading Sci-Fi as a diversion. Your ‘what if’, and from what I see in the playback, makes me think your supposition about this being a hieratical society isn’t too far off.”
“Go on,” Decker said, pouring two mugs of coffee, and handing one to the doctor. She accepted it with a smiled, “tell me what you are thinking.”
“I suspect, although I have no evidence to support it except what I see in the video, that there might be a few more levels than you think.”
“How so.”
“Your assessment of the blue aliens being equivalent to a non-commission officer, a sergeant, sounds about right, the yellow one is probably a low ranking officer type, and answers to another being higher up the chain of command.”
“Why can’t they be the ones in charge?”
“Have you ever known senior officers to go into the field? No, they answer to someone higher up, and they probably answer to someone even higher. It could be a strictly military hierarchy, or a combination of civilian and military, much like ours. The people at the top, the real leaders give the order or commands to flunkies under then, the bureaucrats in turn pass them on those under them, or directly to the military types. Have you ever seen a government paper pusher risk his life on the front line?”
“No, can’t say I have.”
“No, they wouldn’t want to risk their lives where the pesky natives could hurt them, or get their nice clean suits dirty, until the military tells them the filthy natives have been pacified, and they have them under control, before they put a foot on the ground.”
“I get your point.”
“It’s much the same as you, and we have done. I mean the US and the Brits. Think about what your people did in Africa, India, and the Far East. Or we did in the mid-east, except, in this case we are dealing with an ELE.”
“ELE?”
“An extinction level event.”
“Oh, yeah, you could be right, but why only one ship… is that all they’d need?” Doc Mason shrugged.
“Who knows? Maybe this is just the scout ship to clear the way for the main colonization ships coming behind them.” That was a frightening thought. If they couldn’t beat the first ship, what chance did they have of beating the second wave?
“But what about training them?”
“Maybe they don’t have to. Maybe it’s genetically programmed into them.” Decker stood and paced back and forth across the small space of the office looking angry.
“How the hell are we supposed to defeat them… star ships, bio-mechs, drones, super weapons, and all that shit!” He snarled.
“Until we get somewhere… this secret base of yours, we won’t know. It could be the US military has started to get together to figure this out already.”
“I sure hope so Doc, I surly do.”
“There’s still the question of how we get at the mother ship in orbit. As long as it can move around and drop KEWs on any threat, we’re screwed.”
“Yeah, whoever is in charge up there isn’t going to risk his precious ass coming down here, while there’s still a chance he or it could get it shot off.”
“First things first, Decker. You have to decide to find a way around this base, or take it out.”
“It's hard enough on the girls walking along the roads with the packs they are carrying. To ask them to hump them over hill and dale with no way of knowing if they could get pass the roadblocks even then, was asking a little too much. Trained troopers could do it, but they’d have months, if not years to train and prepare for something like that. This wasn’t SAS ‘Selection’ where you got a pat on the back before you went home and ‘better luck next time’. I’ll probably lose half of the team if I tried that.”
“You know, it occurred to me, like us, these aliens might not be able to tell one human from another.”
“So?” Decker asked.
“I could drug Burrole so he wouldn’t give you any trouble, and you could use him to get inside the base by acting like his team mates.”
“Go with it Doc, and then?”
“Well, you used the trick of using the girls as bait; maybe you could do the same again.” Decker chewed his lower lip, deep in thought. It was a lot easier when he was a grunt; all he had to do was follow orders and bitch about them like the rest. Now it was his turn in the barrel, and his plan other people’s lives depended on. Not so easy when you are on the other side. Guessing wrong could get the girls killed.
“Let’s go have a word with the asshole.” He didn’t have to specify which asshole, or what he intended to do to get the answers he needed.
“Why didn’t the aliens tag all of you?” He asked, walking in, slapping the man awake.
“Huh! What…” Even strapped to the table, Burrole managed to fall into a light sleep, despite his fear. “Don’t know… they just tagged me and told me it was enough to get me in and out of the base.”
“What about the prisoners you bring in, you stripped them or do they have clothes on?”
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“Don’t matter. The aliens strip them naked before shoving them into one of those containers.”
“But you don’t know what happens to them when they do, right?”
“No… no… just that they push them inside and they don’t come back out.” That didn’t sound good. Decker noticed the hesitation in Burrole voice.
“What else?”
“No… nothing really, but… well a lot of them start screaming and carrying on when the aliens grab them… that is until they stick them with something. After that they are quiet as lambs.” Decker gritted his teeth. If he didn’t need this pile of shit alive, he’d slit his throat right now.
“Do your thing, Doc, and I’ll get the girls ready.” She looked at him and nodded, pulling a syringe out of her pocket.
“Thought you’d say that.”
"What you gona do?" Burrole stuttered, eyes wide seeing the needle, and the grin on Doc Mason's face.
Walking down the middle of the road in full view of the mechs was probably the hardest thing he’d ever done. Decker could feel the fear sweat running down his side under his shirt, yet oddly the fear wasn’t for himself, but for the five girls from Alpha Team. They were his point people and his best shots, except Joann, but she was on over-watch with his favorite weapon loaded with the armor piercing rounds. The five girls were armed with his old teammates M4A1 assault rifles, preset for three round burst fire, doubting the girls had enough fire discipline not to fire off the whole mag the moment he dropped the hammer. Three hours before he drilled them mercilessly in fire control and switching mags. He first gone over the process with each one, impressing on them the necessity of remaining calm and maintaining their cool under fire.
“It is said that the most useless thing on any battle field is a soldier who runs out of ammo, and I have to agree. Don’t go shooting off all your ammo at nothing. Once the UFM is down switch to another, keep firing until they are all down, and remember to reload. I’ll say it again. Count your bursts. If you lose count, reload and keep firing.”
