Invasion

Chapter Twelve

High overhead, the first of the landing craft disengaged from the Guiding Star, slowly falling into a new orbit. Powerful optical sensors scanned their designated landing site, watching for possible threats and picking out targets for further bombardment, before the craft slowed their orbital speed and started to fall towards the planet. Streaks of light accompanied them down, racing ahead to strike at targets on the ground, clearing the way for the landing.

Inside, warriors and a handful of priests waited nervously for the landing. They were, they knew, almost helpless as long as they were in their craft. The natives of the world below had expended most of their weapons that were capable of reaching orbit, but the lower the landing craft came, the more likely it was that they would enter the engagement range of previously unseen weapons, ones designed to engage aircraft rather than spacecraft. The landing craft were completely beyond their ability to stealth; the heat of their entry into the atmosphere alone would provide a perfect target for enemy fire. Some of them prayed, as soldiers had done throughout history, others just waited for the landing and the coming fight. As the first to set foot on the alien world, they could expect vast estates and fame… if they survived.

A handful reviewed what little data was known about the aliens. It was a matter of policy that few warriors would know the alien language, but those that did would have to be in the front lines, in hopes of convincing the aliens — the humans — to surrender without a fight. Few believed that would happen. They’d studied their own history extensively and the Truth had been resisted, constantly, by every breed on their homeworld and every other race they’d encountered. The Unification Wars alone had cost millions of lives, even though it had bred a planetary unity and a determination never to risk extinction again. Earth would become another settled world. It had been written.

And it would be done.

Dawn was breaking as Joshua awoke from his bed and climbed blearily into the shower. Austin had been luckier than some other cities; the power and water supplies had remained on, even four days after the aliens had attacked the planet. The shower wasn’t quite as reassuring as it had once been — and it had a nasty habit of suddenly running cold in the middle of a hot downpour — but it was enough to shock him awake. He climbed out of the shower, dressed rapidly in his standard working clothes, and retrieved the gun from under his pillow. It still seemed to be working.

He scowled down at the weapon and winced. He knew almost nothing about guns. The gun nut who lived on the fifth floor had given it to him, along with a handful of clips, but Joshua had tuned out the lecture on how the gun worked, past the basics. He could take off the safety, fire and reload, but past that… he didn’t even know what type of gun it was. It didn’t give him a feeling of inflated self-esteem, either; he’d almost been disappointed when he’d brandished it for the first time. He wouldn’t have taken the weapon, at all, except for the fact that Austin was clearly a city on the edge; the residents of the apartment had been pushed into banding together to keep themselves alive.

Coffee, he thought, and staggered out the door and down to the next flat. It had never been occupied, or at least it had never been occupied since Joshua had moved in, and it had become the communal kitchen, despite some dark mutterings about creeping communism. Between the thirty men, women and children who lived in the apartment block, they’d amassed quite a surprising amount of food and equipment, including campfire stoves and other camping gear. If the power failed completely, which Joshua suspected was likely to happen sooner or later, they would be still capable of boiling water and cooking their food. The whole arrangement worked on trust and while Joshua would have scoffed before the war, now he was amazed by how well it was working out.

As long as the food holds out, he thought, sourly. Sally Adair, who had been appointed official coffee maker, poured him a cup without even being asked. Joshua didn’t know who’d thought of electing a twelve-year-old girl as coffee-maker, but he had to admit that it had been devious; somehow, trying to cajole or steal more coffee out of her was impossible. Their father had been making daily trips to the bank, trying to build up a supply of dollars, but Joshua suspected that it wouldn’t be much use. The President might have restricted withdrawals to three hundred dollars a day, something that would have been unthinkable a month ago, but dollars were becoming less and less useful. In time, Mr Adair might even find himself faced with his cash becoming useless and the other thing he had to trade would be his daughters…

Joshua shook his head, hoping to banish the image, and took a seat in the corner. Sally got very irritated when people took her coffee mugs away and didn’t return them. The city was slowly being eaten out of food and drink… and when it ran out completely, all hell was going to break loose. A city the size of Austin, which had a population of nearly eight hundred thousand inhabitants, consumed an astonishing amount of food and drink… and while there had been stockpiles, they were being distributed out to the public in hopes of preventing a panic. The Governor had tried to make hording illegal, but as a law, it was about as unenforceable as the laws against copying CDs and putting them on the internet. There had been a couple of cases where the police had met with armed resistance to their plans to distribute some of the larger private stockpiles and the entire city was on edge. The damage to the infrastructure surrounding the city meant that incoming food was going to be reduced… and, when the city dwellers worked that out, there was going to be panic.

He took another sip of his coffee and shivered. The entire global infrastructure, according to the internet, had been completely knocked down by the aliens. Ships were being sunk, more or less at random… and international banking had been destroyed. America didn’t import much in the way of food — in contrast to Japan, which did and therefore would be on the verge of starvation within a week — but everything else that was imported would be… delayed. Chinese steel, Japanese electronics… everything that came from overseas would now never come, while the internal transport network had been shot to hell. No wonder the Governor had thousands of policemen and National Guardsmen patrolling the city; it wouldn’t be too long until the social order started to collapse completely.

Sally called over to him as two more people entered the room. “Good coffee?”

“Yes, thank you,” Joshua replied, placing the cup in the sink and earning a dirty look. It was the work of a moment to clean the cup and place it neatly on the side for someone else to use. He was supposed to be on the guard shift in an hour — so far, no one had tried to break into the apartment, but they all knew that it was just a matter of time — but until then, he had to return to his apartment and start logging into the internet. It wasn’t what it had been before the war… but then, what had?

The thought stayed with him as he walked back to his apartment. America looked the same on the surface, but the entire country had taken a beating. Television was almost completely off the air, apart from a handful of minor channels, and radio was… erratic. Kids had to play with their friends now, rather than watching television all the time, and older children had to grow up fast. Schools and colleges had been cancelled for the moment and most parents were trying to keep their kids off the streets. People were pulling together, with or without help from the feds… but Austin was one of the lucky cities. If the radio or internet was to be believed, Detroit was on the verge of restarting the civil war.

A roar of thunder passed high overhead. He cringed, remembering, deep inside, the silent skies after 9/11. There hadn’t been any aircraft in the skies since the aliens had arrived — the internet claimed that they were all blasted out of the sky by the aliens from orbit — and the sudden change shocked him. A series of thunderclaps followed, the entire building shaking with their impact, and he felt himself stagger. He heard the sound of smashing china below him, back in the kitchen, but ignored it. He had to get to the roof! The elevator had been marked as untrustworthy since long before the invasion, but he could still take the stairs. He ran up them, passing others coming out of their apartments, half of them holding guns as if they believed the aliens were coming down right on their heads… and burst onto the roof.

“My God,” he breathed, as the sight struck his eyes. Austin seemed to have been hit several times by the alien weapons — kinetic energy weapons, according to the internet; they didn’t need nukes when they could destroy anything from orbit — but it wasn’t that that caught his attention. “They’re landing!”

A massive set of contrails was burning across the sky. The sight was eerie, almost impossible to grasp, a set of… rockets moving through the air. He scrabbled for the binoculars someone had left on the roof and pulled them to his eyes, wincing as the brightness of the rockets almost blinded him. He’d seen, a long time ago, a movie about the first astronauts returning to Earth, their space capsule overheating as it came down in the atmosphere and what he was seeing now was almost exactly the same. It would be nice to believe that the alien craft had somehow been destroyed and were burning up in the atmosphere, but he couldn’t cling to the delusion. The aliens were landing… somewhere in the direction of San Angelo.

They’re insane, he thought, his ears echoing with the sound of their passage. They might be hundreds of kilometres above the Earth, but he could still hear them… and the thunderclaps of their KEWs impacting around the city. The Patriot missile batteries that had survived the first exchange of fire wouldn’t survive this one; as he watched, a flare of white light flashed up in the city, followed by a thunderous explosion. Windows were shattering all over the city. He didn’t want to think about the number of people who had been hurt in the invasion.

“We’ll eat them alive,” the gun nut said, with heavy satisfaction. He was toting a long rifle-like weapon that somehow managed to look completely terrifying. Joshua wouldn’t have bet against it being an illegal military-grade sniper rifle. “If they’re on the ground, they can be killed, right?”

Joshua shrugged. The closest he’d been to Iraq had been Florida, but he’d read enough about the insurgency against American forces to know that fighting the aliens was going to be bloody, very bloody. The aliens might have their own way of fighting insurgencies… or maybe they would force the Texans to turn Austin into a post-modern version of Stalingrad.

He smiled suddenly. If nothing else, he was going to get one hell of a story.

The enemy attempts to engage the landing craft hadn’t been entirely unsuccessful. A handful of the smaller, expendable craft had been hit with ABM warheads and destroyed, the stresses of their sudden course change tearing them apart. Two of the larger landing craft had rocked as warheads detonated under their heat shields, but the shields were strong enough to absorb the blow without significant damage. Retro-rockets fired madly to slow the descent, trying to ensure that the craft landed without emulating a KEW and causing massive damage — while incidentally keeping the crew and warriors alive.

An alien town seemed to spin up at them and they came down, hard. Shockwaves ran through the entire fleet of landing craft, but the warriors had braced themselves for the impact and were unhurt. Rapidly, knowing that they might be coming under fire at any moment, they ran for their escape hatches and vehicles, spilling out onto the new world they had come to conquer. One way or the other, there was no way back to the Guiding Star, not unless they secured a safe landing site for the spaceplanes. The landing craft could never return to space.

“Dear holy shit.”

Sergeant Oliver Pataki stared in disbelief as the small unit made its way towards the alien landing site. They’d been on a patrol of the area, just to check up on the thousands of refugees who’d fled the city and to locate possible deployment areas for Third Corps when the aliens had started to land. They’d had to seek shelter as the aliens had landed, the noise of their landing had been deafening, even at their distance, but now they were heading towards the alien positions. The higher-ups back at Fort Hood would need intelligence just to decide on a response.

Fort Hood was huge. The aliens had hit it, but they hadn’t actually done much damage… although they had killed several hundred men. If the remains of Third Corps could get into position to engage the enemy before they were deployed, the human race would win the first engagement with the aliens on the ground. Pataki knew, however, that that wasn’t going to be easy. Part of the platoon’s duties had been to check up on the damage to the roads and transportation network and they’d discovered that the aliens had blown the shit out of it. He didn’t fancy driving a few hundred Abrams tanks towards the aliens, not when the aliens would see them coming from orbit… and would probably drop a hammer on them. He’d listened to the briefings on possible enemy weapons with great care; some of them had been outrageously impossible, but others were all too practical. The crater back at Fort Hood provided all the proof of that that he could possibly want.

The massive column of towering flames reached into the sky. It seemed to be completely uncontrollable and he found himself wondering if the aliens had suffered a terrible disaster and had crashed into the ground. It wouldn’t have been that impossible — he was fairly sure that the aliens weren’t magicians, even if they could do things that humans couldn’t do — but somehow he doubted it. They wouldn’t have set out to invade a planet unless they were sure that they could actually land on it.

“Scott, stay behind,” he ordered, tersely. If they reached the top of that hill, they should have a good vantage point for staring down at the alien activities. Unless he missed his guess, the aliens had actually come down, intentionally or otherwise, on top of a small town. The population… he hoped they’d all fled, but if they’d been caught in the open. “If something happens to us, haul ass out of here.”

“Sergeant,” Scott said, tersely. Pataki could see the disappointment in his eyes, but someone had to remain to watch from a distance. “Good luck.”

Pataki led the quick march up the hill. It was only a handful of minutes before they reached the top — it wasn’t a very high hill — and they gazed cautiously down onto a scene from nightmares. The entire town seemed to be on fire, with human bodies scattered everywhere… and alien craft seemed to be distributing their troops. He pulled his binoculars to his eyes and stared down at the massive craft. They looked to be giant conical ships, each one the size of a major warship… and hundreds of aliens and their vehicles were spilling out of them. He watched, hypnotized, as the first marching group of aliens advanced out of the town.

They weren’t human. Standing still, wrapped in black body armour that concealed everything, it was easy to mistake them for humans, but as they moved, they bent and flexed in ways impossible for a human. They seemed almost to be made out of stiff jelly, each one moving almost like a shimmering mass, but yet… they marched perfectly in time. Pataki forced down the growing sense of unreality, remembering an encounter, long ago, with a humanoid android he’d seen at a science-fair, and forced himself to concentrate on the aliens. There seemed to be hundreds of them, maybe thousands, maybe more! They’d certainly gotten there the first with the most!

He wished, suddenly, that he had a nuke. A single nuke would have killed them all and put an end to their invasion of the planet. He watched as they set up machines around their landing site, some of them obviously designed to defend against aerial attacks, while others advanced out to secure an expanding perimeter. Large alien tanks — they had to be tanks — hummed up towards their position, riding on cushions of air. The hover tanks seemed unbothered by any kind of terrain.

Duty reasserted itself and he lifted his radio to his mouth. He could only hope that the alien jamming wouldn’t affect the signal. Fort Hood had to know what was going on and what the aliens were doing, whatever the risk. He composed a brief message and spoke, quickly, as the aliens headed around the hill and onwards to conquer the virgin land. He knew that they weren’t unstoppable, but from their position, they looked as if they had already won.

No, he thought, as he repeated his signal. They haven’t won yet.