His guide told him some of the stories as they reached a hidden door, leading down to a bunker complex. Fort Hood had been on alert since the aliens had separated their ship and most of the buildings had been abandoned…and the aliens had barely dented their capabilities, even if – his guide assured him – there had been a lot of very convincing weeping and gnashing of teeth on open channels. They’d come in expecting an easy occupation, ambushed and chased back out again, after which the fighting had settled down to the occasional savage confrontation between the two sides and plenty of insurgency. The bunker system, something that wasn't discussed publicly, had kept Fort Hood alive…and kicking.
“So that’s what they’re doing,” Colonel Osborn said, when Brent had finally finished his story. He’d regained a little of his own pride when he’d realised that the soldiers were in awe of his own accomplishments, even though neither side had really harmed the aliens enough to make them give up and withdraw. “They’re settling here.”
He scowled. Brent had been a little surprised to discover that a mere colonel was commanding the defence, but it had turned out that the original commanding officer had been killed by the aliens, although so far it seemed that they didn’t know that.
“We’ll forward this off to Washington,” he added. “You might have to go with it later. Until then, get some rest. You’ve earned it.”
Chapter Forty-Two
Always listen to experts. They'll tell you what can't be done, and why. Then do it.
-Robert A. Heinlein
“It’s confirmed, then?”
Paul nodded. The sight of the massive engineering bay, covered with engineers moving, welding and slowly building the spacecraft, awed him. He’d been a frustrated spaceman long before he’d passed his tenth birthday, learning far too quickly that very few people flew the fantastic space shuttles…and that they never went anywhere, and part of him envied Gary Jordan, now a General, beyond words.
“Yes,” he said, grimly. “They’re landing in Australia.”
Gary nodded slowly. “And it’s still going to be a week before we’re completely ready to move,” he said. “At least that should keep them busy somewhere on the other side of the world.”
Paul scowled. The aliens had fallen on Australia one morning and, according to the handful of reports, were securing their landing zones now in the centre of the country. The Australian Army had put up a fight, but the aliens had stamped on them from orbit with the same power they’d brought to bear on America and the Middle East, forcing the remainder of the army to go underground and carry on an insurgency. Australia was hardly as disarmed as Europe, but with far fewer people and far fewer sources of supplies, he didn’t know how long an insurgency could last. They would have made the same kind of preparations as other armies had been making, even since the lessons from Texas had started to sink in, but would they be effective? No one knew for sure.
He cast his gaze around the dissembled spacecraft. “A week?” He asked. It seemed implausible somehow. “Are you sure?”
“Oh, yes,” Gary said. “Really, the guy who invented these things was a genius who didn’t have to work for a bunch of idiots who knew nothing about risk and cared only for pork barrel funding. A few hundred parts, each one easy to make with the right equipment…and all we have to do is put them together like a jigsaw to build a flying spacecraft. It’s far more impressive than I can say; if part of one spacecraft went down, we could cannibalise parts from another to keep it flying, without much in the way of compatibility issues.”
He led the way over to a set of strange-looking modules. “The shuttle that crashed in our territory was a cargo and passenger ship,” he explained. “They were actually capable of carrying quite a bit of cargo and we’ve replaced all of that with weapons. It’s going to make landing a bit more dangerous than it would be for them, but with the parachutes in the nosecone, we should be able to get back down safely. Of course, if we don’t actually win, our chances of survival will be about the same as a meat-eater at the annual tofu-munch convention, but…”
Paul grinned. “How many volunteers did you have?”
“Thousands,” Gary said. “Pretty much every surviving USAF pilot wanted in, along with the remaining astronauts, navy and Marine flyers. We put them all through the training period – it’s lucky we have your lady friend; simulating flight was actually quite difficult without her help – and put the best ones to work, simulating attack vectors. So much needs to be done carefully – we can’t really plan this too much – but if luck is with us, we should be able to hurt them.”
Paul nodded. “And the remainder of the gear?”
“I’ll show you,” Gary said, leading him out of the underground hanger and into another large room. A pile of newly recovered alien equipment lay on the table, being sorted out by a group of young engineers, while a second table had several alien suits lying on them. Gary nodded towards the pile of equipment. “Looks crude, doesn’t it?”
“Yes,” Paul said. “Why…?”
“You’ve never been in combat, have you?” Gary asked. Paul said nothing. It was shameful, at least to him, to admit it, but he’d spent his whole life in the military and had never been shot at or fired a bullet in anger. “Trust me; the Pentagon buys a lot of crap that promises the heavens and the earths, but is hell on the battlefield users. The guys in procurement tell the designers to fuck off and they bitch loudly to their congressman, who takes a large bribe and orders the army or the fighter jocks or whoever to accept it. Oh, they’re not always that bad, but…most of them tend to have flaws that need to be edited out, somehow.”
His eyes lit up with the glow of enthusiasm. “Now, take the AK-47, preferred weapon of rag-headed punks from one end of the world to the other,” he continued. “It’s simple, easy to learn and can take one hell of a lot of mistreatment by illiterate ditch-diggers before it craps out. This technology, Colonel, is an alien version of the AK-47; they could build handheld lasers and other really nifty shit, but would it be usable on the battlefield? This stuff may be crude, but it works.”
“But it can be countered, right?” Paul asked. “We can get around their tech.”
“Oh, of course,” Gary said. “Some of their weapons are actually inferior to ours; the handful of their sniper rifles are far inferior to ours, but don’t let that fool you. In the hands of someone who knows what they’re doing, a blunderbuss is a lethal weapon. Their night-vision gear is also inferior, but we’ve actually had reports that they’ve been improving theirs or deploying newer stuff…and they have the distant advantages of not needing to worry about how much damage they do to their surroundings. Who cares? It’s all going to be knocked down, right?”
“So it seems,” Paul said, tightly. The images from Texas were far from reassuring. “If they keep expanding at their current rate, they’ll be knocking down Austin before too long.”
“I bet that will make the people unhappy,” Gary said, lightly. He grinned as he paced over to the other table. “Now this” – he lifted up one of the alien suits – “is sheer genius. There just isn’t any other word.”
Paul studied the garment thoughtfully. He’d seen images, pictures and videos, of the alien stormtroopers, but it was the first time he’d actually seen one of their outfits. It seemed to be composed of slinky silk, something that just shimmied over his hands, like liquid oil. It felt weird to the touch, as if he wasn't touching anything at all, almost as if it wasn’t really there.
“I give up,” he said, finally. “What the hell is it?”
“Buggered if I know,” Gary said. “We had a few dozen materials experts, scientists, even a pair of fashion designers in here and they took two of them to pieces, only to discover that it’s something well beyond our current capabilities. You want to know what this baby can do?”
Paul lifted an eyebrow. “Show me.”
“Watch,” Gary said. He made a fist and waved it in front of the alien garment in a threatening style. “Take that,
you…illegal alien.”
He thumped the garment, which made a metallic sound. Paul stared as Gary rubbed his hand. “That always hurts,” he said. “Somehow, you hit this thing with enough force, it hardens instantly, hard enough to repel the attack. You can cut it with a knife, if you try, but come in too hard and it just hardens. We’re lucky they didn’t manage to get the tech even tougher; this stuff is better than our body armour already and if it had been better…well, invincible alien warriors would have kicked our butts all over the world.”
“But they can be killed,” Paul protested. “I mean…the wearer of this one doesn’t need it anymore, does he?”
“No,” Gary said. “Bullets do get through, mainly headshots, although the armour is far from perfect. The interesting thing is what else it does. It provides near-complete protection from chemical weapons, for one thing, somehow filtering them all out before they can reach the alien inside. There is a breather here” – he pointed to a spot under the mask – “that filters out anything dangerous, or merely irritating. I imagine that some chemical weapons, the basic ones if nothing else, will work on unprotected aliens, but so far no one has let us test them on the alien captives.”
“I don’t think that that would be a good idea,” Paul said, dryly. “If we take one of their Inquisitors alive, feel free to do whatever you like to him, but we need the others.”
“Sooner or later, someone is going to pull off a chemical strike on one of their settlements,” Gary said. “They don’t wear the armour all the time; hell, their women go around topless. Something simple is going to have an effect, but what?”
“Knowing our luck, it will probably give them superpowers,” Paul joked. “Anything else that’s come out of R&D?”
“Microwaves,” Gary said. He smiled thinly. “There is a school of thought that believes that we can use microwaves to really mess up their day. The designers are currently working on something we can test in the field, as the President has banned testing them on any of our prisoners, and when we have a working model, it’ll be tested. Just imagine a group of alien infantry, running along, when suddenly the liquid in their legs starts to boil. It’s based around a crowd-control weapon, one that can drive entire crowds away, so it’s workable…but we don’t know how much protection their suits will provide. We’ll just have to test it and see.”
He put down the suit and scowled. “That’s something that we won’t have for the offensive, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s going to be at least two weeks before we have it ready to go…”
“Never mind,” Paul said. It wasn't a weapon that could be used on all of the aliens at once. The real priority, now, was weapons that could be used against the spacecraft in orbit. If they could be destroyed, despite the vast damage inflicted on America, they could liberate Texas in fairly short order. “Have you prepared the special suits?”
Gary nodded. “There’s one rather small problem with them,” he admitted, as he led the way into yet another way. “We don’t move like the aliens. The first three will be alright, as they will be worn by aliens, but the minute they see the others moving, they will smell a rather large rat. How do you intend to solve that?”
“Leave that to us,” Paul assured him. The fewer people who knew that, the better; no one knew how far the aliens might have compromised their security. There were far too many people who had had relatives in Texas, perhaps now in alien hands. “Are you sure that you can have all the craft ready to fly on schedule?”
“Yep,” Gary said. “Hell, we could fly in twenty-four hours, if you want. It’s just a question of fitting everything together and then we can fly.”
“Good work,” Paul said. He paused. “Are you sure that you want to fly the mission in person?”
“I’m the most experienced spaceman the United States has left,” Gary said. “I did think about taking one of the aliens along with us, but that…might provide too much temptation for them.” He paused suddenly. “Do you really trust them?”
“I think so,” Paul said. “You know, in all of the skirmishes along the Red Zone’s border, not a one has ever surrendered? That fits in with what Femala told us; they kill male prisoners without mercy.”
“They took prisoners from us,” Gary said, thoughtfully. “Have you considered that?”
“They’re being worked to death,” Paul said. The images taken by the insurgents had been spread across the world, awakening a new desire to fight on, whatever the cost. The aliens had been doing the same in the Middle East and probably Australia, working the human prisoners to death. The soldiers, sailors and airmen might have been in the best of health when they’d been captured, but after nearly three months, they’d be dropping like flies. “I don’t think that that counts as the softly-softly approach.”
“No,” Gary said. “Still, they’re not human, and so…I don’t trust them, not completely.”
“Without them, we could never have gotten this far,” Paul reminded him. “We don’t have to trust them, but we need them.”
“One week,” Gary mused. “One week…to victory, or certain destruction.”
***
“Everything’s gone silent,” Joshua complained, examining the laptop. The Internet was the same as always, on the surface, but more than a few voices had gone silent. “What happened to him?”
Tessa shrugged from her seat, watching over his shoulder. He was very aware of her presence…and how she could break him in half without really trying. His former life hadn’t prepared him for female Special Forces soldiers, particularly ones who told him tales about how she’d infiltrated some terrorist’s harem and killed him when he'd summoned her to his bed. Her stories were so complex and strange that he really didn’t know if she was telling the truth, or merely playing games with his mind.
“He might well have made it,” she said, dryly. “He said he’d send a signal when he made it, so…just wait and see.”
“History is being made out there,” Joshua protested. “History…and I’m stuck here.”
“Is that a reporter’s spider sense?” Tessa asked. “You’re stuck here because the aliens would cut off your head the moment they laid eyes on you. I’m stuck here because the Captain told us to keep our heads down for a while before we tried to make any other aliens regret ever landing on Earth. If history is being made, it’s being made elsewhere and we’re on the substitutes bench.”
Joshua scowled as an explosion rattled the windows. “Someone didn’t get the stop order,” he said. “Was that one of yours?”
“No one could really control the insurgency,” Tessa admitted. “The aliens will break one cell and discover that they don’t have any links to other cells. It should drive them mad.”
“Being here is driving me mad,” Joshua protested. He knew he sounded petulant, but he couldn’t help it. “I’m bored.”
“Something will happen soon,” Tessa assured him. “Just wait and see.”
***
“One week,” the President said, staring down at the map. The Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean was covered with little icons. “One week.”
“We have to get moving now,” Paul said. “Once we get all the pieces in play, we won’t be able to stop, or parts of the operation will go ahead anyway and fail.”
The President looked up at him. “And what are the odds of success or failure?”
“Fifty-fifty,” Paul admitted. “There are some parts of the plan that might fail, and fail spectacularly, but we’d still have a chance. If both of the vital parts fail, then the aliens will have won the battle and know, exactly, what we tried to do. That will certainly draw a response from them that we won’t like.”
“They could go after the remaining cities,” the President mused. “If we try and fail…should we cancel the operation?”
Paul hesitated. “No, Mr President,” he said. “We should go ahead and pray.”
The President lifted an eyebrow. “Risking the lives of every American…and indeed all six billion peop
le on Earth?”
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