Invasion

Chapter Eighteen

Night was falling as Captain Brent Roeder led seven men out of their apartment and up through the silent streets. Austin had once been a well-lit city, but now hardly any of the street lamps were working, nor were there flickering lights from behind any windows. The city felt like a ghost town, one occupied by an army of monsters, and the people were trying to keep out of sight. Brent partly wanted them to come out and fight beside him, but the rest of him was glad that they were out of the way. The fighting was about to get messy.

They ghosted through the streets, sticking to smaller roads and back alleys, trying to remain away from the alien patrols. The aliens hadn’t announced an official curfew, something that had surprised him, but they would probably take an interest in anyone on the streets after dark. It was what he’d do in their position and, given the amount of weapons and explosives they were carrying, would mark them out at once as soldiers. The aliens didn’t seem to shoot armed civilians on sight, as they would have been legally permitted to do under human laws, but they did take them away and, so far, no one had seen any of them again. They might have gone into the work gangs who were clearing the streets, or they might have been taken out of the city, shot and dumped in a mass grave. The internet had been full of speculation, but no one actually knew much for sure. The only piece of encouraging news was that the aliens were having a hard time controlling the chunk of Texas they’d occupied.

Time to make it a bit harder, he thought, as they reached the gas station. The aliens had destroyed every official religious building in the city and, in doing so, had created a few million more enemies. If they applied that standard on a wider scale… it didn’t bode well for human religious cities. He suspected that the aliens hadn’t realised just how many human sects didn’t want or need religious buildings — Baptists didn’t need a meeting house — or, for that matter, how many religious books were in private hands. He couldn’t even begin to guess at how many bibles existed in Texas alone, let alone the other religious texts. Their response was likely to be brutal and unpleasant. The only reason he could think of for destroying religious buildings was that they wanted to replace them with their own… and that wouldn’t sit well with humanity.

He scouted out the gas station yesterday and was relieved to discover that it hadn’t been looted. It had been operated by a Pakistani family who’d later tried to flee the city, abandoning their home and livelihood. They’d also left a gas tanker that had been used to make deliveries. The aliens still prevented humans from using any kind of motor vehicle, sometimes shooting up a few cars to make the point, and so it had been abandoned, along with its cargo. It wasn’t completely full, unfortunately, but there was enough to make one hell of a bang. He made a series of hand signals to his men, ordering them to take up their positions, and then slipped into the driver’s seat. It was a matter of moments to hotwire the tanker and move it forward so that it was closer to the road. He left his little surprise in the vehicle and slipped out again, back into the darkness.

The aliens, it seemed, patrolled on a regular basis. They had ten minutes until the next patrol would hover down the road. Two of his men quickly pushed a car into the middle of the street, blocking it, even as the others scattered a handful of other surprises around the area. As soon as they were finished, they drew back and waited for the aliens to arrive. If they’d changed their schedule…

Brent smiled as he heard the hum of the alien vehicles. He’d been nervous that they’d send a tank along, but instead they’d merely been using their armoured fighting vehicles. There was something about their design that suggested that they were used to fighting insurgencies, but he guessed they’d learnt out of a book, rather than real experience. No sane and experienced soldier would have driven up to a blockade without checking the area first.

Got you, you bastards, he thought. From his vantage point, he could see the alien hatches opening and a platoon of alien soldiers emerging, wearing their dark masks. That was more worrying than he liked to admit — no one knew what kind of night-vision gear the aliens had — but they were committed now. Four of the aliens headed towards the blocking car, the others fanned out towards the gas station… and the waiting ambush. There wasn’t any time, any longer, to wait for more aliens to emerge. He pushed down on the small detonator and all hell broke loose. The gas tanker exploded and a sheet of fire cascaded down onto the alien vehicles.

“Move,” he snapped, and ran for his life. The aliens smashed every radio transmitter, without fail, and they might try to target him from orbit. It seemed insane to waste a projectile on a single man, but everything since the war had begun had been insane. Shots started to ring out as his three snipers started to pour fire onto the remaining aliens and their burning vehicles; he heard their ammunition start to cook off in the midst of the fire, creating a new hazard for anyone nearby. Trapped, the handful of surviving aliens had no choice, but to hunker down and hope that they could hold out until help arrived. Ironically, Brent wanted them to survive, now; they represented a lure to the remainder of the aliens. Without them, it was possible that the aliens would just write them off and not bother to send help.

“They’re coming,” Fahy shouted, his voice almost drowned out by the roar of the fires and the shooting. “I see two heavy tanks and three smaller vehicles.”

Brent grinned. The aliens were about to make a bad situation worse, much worse. High overhead, he heard the noise of a helicopter, one that he’d never heard before. It had to be an alien craft and so he nodded to one of his men, who brought up a Stinger and prepared to target the alien aircraft. Brent was already moving towards the second ambush site when the Stinger was launched, blasting up towards the unsuspecting alien craft, which was hit and fell burning out of the sky. There was no sign that the crew had escaped.

The lead alien tank went over the mine and detonated it. Brent had worried that the hovercraft wouldn’t trigger the mine, but it did, sending a burst of flame up towards the soft underbelly of the alien vehicle. It was armoured enough to allow the crew to survive, but it fell to the ground and skidded to a halt, out of the action for the moment. The other alien craft opened fire with their machine gun-like weapons, but they weren’t shooting at any of his men, as far as he could tell. Buttoned up in their vehicles, the aliens were just attempting to force them to keep their heads down, trying to prevent the humans from using antitank missiles or suchlike on them. If Brent had had some of those missiles with him, he might have tried to use them.

The ground shook, violently, as an office block was struck from high above. Two of his snipers had been positioned there and they had to have been killed in the collapsing building, along with however many other humans there were inside, hiding out from the aliens. He could hear the sounds of more aliens approaching, marching out and setting up a cordon around the area, hoping to trap and destroy his force. He gave a quick whistle, waited for the response, and then headed down towards a shopping mall. He’d picked the location for the ambush with malice aforethought; it was not only the perfect place to get in a solid blow, but a fairly easy place to escape from, given some careful planning.

The aliens didn’t stop shooting. Brent wasn’t sure, but he thought he could hear the sound of other weapons booming out in the distance, human weapons. It sounded as if the entire town had risen up against the aliens, although it was much more likely that there were only a few groups taking advantage of the chaos to strike a few blows at the aliens. It would have been much easier if they could coordinate the various groups, but that would have been impossible, not without risking SF34 being exposed to the aliens. The civilians would be on their own. Other alien aircraft flew overhead, but now they didn’t dare try to engage them; they might as well have put out a call to the aliens inviting them to come kill them.

“In here,” Fahy muttered. He looked scarred, but Brent was glad to see that they were all right. The five remaining men hadn’t been seriously wounded. The others might have survived, but he doubted it; the aliens had smashed the building to rubble. The interior of the mall looked eerie in darkness, with smashed glass and shattered shops everywhere; the looters had stripped the building rather comprehensively. He couldn’t understand why someone would want to strip a shop of the latest dolls, or even crass souvenirs of Texas, but people did strange things when society broke down. The odds were that they would be desperately hunting for food in a few days, if they weren’t already. All the thousand-dollar dolls in the world wouldn’t buy them food. “Sir?”

Brent looked quickly back towards the scene of the engagement, still wrapped in flame, and then followed him into the shaft. They’d checked it out first and getting down to the underground tunnels and sewers was fairly straightforward, if unpleasant. The smell was worse than it had been when the aliens had started to burn bodies, but he tolerated it, hooking up a breath mask as they made their way through the tunnels, up towards an exit five kilometres away, in an old warehouse. They could hole up there until the dawn broke, then change their clothes and slip back to their base. The odds were that it wasn’t going to be a very pleasant night for the aliens.

The window shattered as a hail of bullets crashed through the tape.

“Get down,” Mr Adair shouted, as the wall was pocketed with bullet marks. Joshua didn’t have to be told twice. He was on the floor within seconds, watching in horror as the burst of fire tore the room to bits. He could hear one of the girls screaming, one of the other boys laughing in awe as the endless stream of bullets chewed into the wall. After what felt like hours, but was probably seconds, the bullets stopped… and a dull ominous silence fell.

He looked over at Mr Adair. “Are you all right?”

“Hell no,” Mr Adair said, his face very pale. The candles they’d been using to illuminate the apartment had to have been visible from outside… and someone had opened fire on them. It might have been the aliens, or it might have been a resistance group, or… there was really no way to tell, not at the moment. “Girls, stay low; when I tell you, start crawling down towards the basement.”

Sally looked fearful, but determined. “Dad, what about the coffee?”

Joshua chuckled and broke it off, suddenly, when Mr Adair glared at him. “Your life is much more important than the coffee,” he reproved his daughter, making the point with a sharp slap to her rump. Joshua hid his smile at her outraged yelp. “Now, get crawling down there and stay low!”

The three of them left, slowly, leaving Joshua alone. His laptop was where he’d left it, but he didn’t dare power it up, not when the light might draw more fire. He crawled over to the candles, mounted on the table, and blew them out, one by one. Darkness fell in the room and, with it, he could see flickering light from outside. Greatly daring, surprising himself by his own courage, he crawled over to the window and peered, carefully, out over the city. Flames and smoke were everywhere and he could hear, in the distance, the sound of shots.

They’re revolting, he thought, with a sudden sense of awe. He wanted to get up and go join them down on the streets, but he didn’t quite dare that much, not when he didn’t know who’d been shooting at them. The streets below were almost empty, but he saw a gang of teenage boys, running towards the fighting and carrying bottles in their hands. He hoped, for their sake, that they were only alcohol, not Molotov Cocktails. The kids wouldn’t last more than a few seconds when the aliens saw them. The anarchy on the streets might be drawing them like a magnet, but they wouldn’t be able to hurt the aliens, now that they were warned…

A burst of fire, fired from somewhere out of his view, came down towards the kids and tore them apart. Joshua watched in horror as an pair of alien vehicles rushed past, one of them firing its heavy gun towards an unidentified target, the sound of the impact and detonation echoing through the air. He saw, briefly, a sniper crawling over a nearby rooftop… and realised that he didn’t dare go onto the roof. Soldiers had mistaken reporters for insurgents before… and the alien rules of engagement, it seemed, were much more liberal than any that American forces had used. He didn’t dare leave, though; he wanted — needed — to know what was going on. Below, the bodies sprawled, abandoned. If they were still alive, they would die there, on the streets.

He saw a beam of light, reaching down from high above like a pointing finger, striking somewhere to the north. The sound of the explosion reached him a second later and he realised he had seen a falling KEW; the aliens, in their anger or desperation, had reached for the heavy firepower. A series of secondary explosions echoed out over the city; he watched, grimly, as a new line of alien vehicles passed, heading northwards as well. The hovercraft drove over the bodies and, when they finished, there was very little left of what had once been human youths.

Bastards, he thought suddenly, as more aliens passed. They were heading towards the Texas State Centre, he realised suddenly, or at least they were heading in the same direction. Some of the great reporting heroes had been on the ground when American or British bases had been attacked by insurgents, surrounded, but never broken, and he wondered if that was what had happened to the aliens. They’d taken over the government buildings in the city and… hell, he’d have bet good money that attacking them would have been one of the population’s fondest dreams. How capable would the aliens be at defending a building they barely knew?

It was the arrival of the reinforcements from the camps outside the city, WarPriest Allon knew, that had turned the tide of the battle. The warriors charged with guarding the human buildings had fought well, but the best they could do was hold out against the attackers, knowing that they might run out of ammunition and be hacked down before they could escape. Nine tanks had been deployed to cover the human buildings — and every human they’d found in the area had been taken to the camps, just in case — but four of them were now burning and two more had been disabled. There had been too many warriors in the area to call in a KEW strike; the entire battle had been a close-run thing.

Dawn rose upon a burning and battered city. Hundreds of warriors patrolled the outskirts of the government zone, while thousands more patrolled the city itself, trying to locate the remaining human insurgents. Most of the remaining human population, Allon was relieved to see, was trying to keep itself out of the firing line. It might have helped keep incidental damage down during the fighting, but the odds were that some of them had been blazing away at his people last night, leaving a grand total of five hundred and seven warriors dead or seriously injured. Partnered with the losses all across the occupied zone, nearly a thousand warriors had been killed outright… and he didn’t want to think about how many humans had been killed. Their death toll, he thought, must number in the high thousands, at best.

And then there were the booby traps. The humans had proved themselves fiendishly cunning; there had been incidents where warriors, not recognising what was harmless and what wasn’t, had strayed into a killing ground and had been slaughtered. Cars had been rigged to explode, mines had been hidden in inventive locations… the chaos went on and on. It would take cycles upon cycles to restore the morale of his warriors; a day ago, they had felt themselves in charge of the city and of the humans. They had been confident of ultimate victory. Now…

Now, they felt as if they’d lost the war.

We’re not used to resistance on this scale, WarPriest Allon thought, coldly. They still held the advantage, but it didn’t feel like it. We never expected anything like it. There was nothing like this, not even during the worst of the Unification Wars. What sort of world have we found? What will we need to do to win?