Invasion

Chapter Twenty-One

The unnatural darkness cloaked the small group of resistance fighters as they made their way towards the alien base. A bare few kilometres from Waco, the night should have been lit up by the glow of the cities and the human habitation all around them, but most of the power was gone. The citizens spent the night in near-complete darkness, illuminated only by candlelight and hand-powered flashlights, while the aliens didn’t seem to need the streetlights. It was possible, Pataki had been warned, that they saw in the dark better than humans, or that their black helmets included an advanced form of night-vision gear. It didn’t seem to matter that much; all that mattered, as far as he was concerned, was getting in as hard a punch as he could.

The aliens hadn’t given chase when they’d been liberated from the destroyed village, allowing the resistance fighters to bring them to a hidden base somewhere within Texas, before arming them and inviting them to continue the fight. Texas seethed with resistance activity, from gasoline bombs being thrown at alien vehicles to attacks by entire companies of resistance fighters, but the aliens were developing their own tactics to counter them. The aliens had cut off most of the communication with the cities — although they didn’t seem to grasp the possibilities of the internet — and they were conducting persistent sweeps for resistance fighters. The tactic wasn’t that successful, but it forced the resistance to remain hidden, while coordinating over such a large area was proving difficult. Worst of all, the aliens had even started to figure out human relationships and, as they started to strengthen their control, a handful of resistance fighters were picked up at checkpoints.

“If we could all coordinate, we might have a chance at actually throwing them out,” the leader had told him. Pataki had been told that the leader had been an accountant in a previous life, but he would have bet good money that there was some military experience in there somewhere. “As it happens, we can only hurt them and hope that people outside the red zone can get supplies in to us.”

Pataki had been astonished to discover how many different groups there were. Mercenaries in training at one of Blackwater’s training camps had proven surprisingly effective… but then, most of them had been ex-servicemen of one kind or another. The inner city gangs had fought the aliens with the same determination they’d used to keep the police out of their territory, but the aliens had brought up heavy firepower and systematically blasted them out of their hiding places. Thousands of soldiers, cut off from the front lines, had turned into insurgents… and Fort Hood, he’d been told, was pinning down thousands of aliens in trying to sweep out the remains of the soldiers there. The entire situation was a bloody mess; he almost felt sorry for the aliens.

Almost. Their base, ahead of him, had been built on the remains of yet another small town. It had been deserted before they arrived, but according to observers, the aliens had flattened all the buildings anyway, paying special attention to the two churches. It seemed to fit their normal pattern; the only religious places they left alone were graveyards, perhaps preferring to leave the dead alone. It was strange thinking of a star-faring race as being scared of ghosts, but maybe that was the answer, although he cautioned himself that just because he wanted to believe it didn’t make it true. The aliens had provoked more attacks on themselves by destroying religious buildings… and, by placing the base so far from major support, they’d handed the resistance a chance at a real success.

Or, perhaps, it was a trap.

The briefing had been clear enough. The aliens had deployed powerful radars around the red zone. Between them, they controlled the skies and blasted anything, aircraft or missile, out of them before they got close enough to do some damage. No aircraft flew on Earth now, apart from the handful of alien helicopters, which at least meant they could fire off anti-aircraft weapons at anything in the sky. The aliens didn’t seem — thank god — to deploy any heavy aircraft, either fighters or bombers, but they didn’t need them. If they were under heavy attack, they called in strikes from orbit… and they’d been doing more of that lately. Something had to be done to throw them back on their heels.

He peered through his night-vision goggles towards the alien base. It was nothing much; a handful of vehicles, carefully organised to protect the vehicle in the centre, the source of all the radar emissions. The techs had gone on and on about multi-phased radar algorithms and bullshit like that, but as far as Pataki was concerned, his only task was to destroy the radar vehicle. No one had told him so, specifically, but he’d picked up enough to guess that his assault wasn’t the only one being mounted. If they could knock down all of the alien radars… but then, they’d still have the ones in space. The very concept astonished him; the aliens could literally sweep the ground with radar emissions from orbit and pick up on any moving vehicle, maybe even a moving person. If it didn’t have the right IFF, it got blasted, automatically.

All right, you bastards, he thought, as he surveyed the remainder of the base. Where are you?

The aliens had billeted their forces in what had probably once been a school. A handful were patrolling around the outskirts of the village, but the remainder were supporting the vehicles, watching for any incoming threat. It all looked surprisingly lax to him — he would have established random patrols of the area, just in case — but maybe the aliens couldn’t afford to expend more people on guarding the radar base. It was even possible that they were running out of soldiers, although that happy thought was probably wishful thinking. They couldn’t rely on the aliens running out of manpower any time soon.

“Sarge,” one of his men whispered. “Look.”

Pataki followed the pointing finger. A group of humans sat there, chained to a truck, a human truck. They didn’t look very pleased to be there, which probably meant that they were slaves, as he had been, rather than collaborators. There were actually quite a few alien collaborators now, although most of them were working for the aliens under duress, their families held hostage for their good behaviour. Pataki was glad, despite himself, that he didn’t have any family in Texas; what would he do if he were told that he had the choice between betraying the resistance, or his family being killed?

“We’ll get them out,” he muttered. “Are the mortar teams ready?”

“Aye, boss,” another man said. He actually had been a government official, too low-level to be important, before the invasion. He’d taken to underground work like a duck took to water. Somehow, he was also one of the best shots in the small company. “They’re ready.”

Pataki smiled, carefully sighted his M16 on one of the alien guards, and pulled the trigger. The alien fell. A moment later, all hell broke loose as the mortars opened fire as one, their shells targeted on the alien radar. Mortars weren’t the most accurate weapon in the world, but they’d had plenty of time to choose their targets and at least one shell landed directly on the alien radar. A chain of explosions tore it apart as the aliens returned fire…

Damn, they’re fast, Pataki thought. His position had barely been missed by a machine gun mounted on one of the IFVs. One of his men took aim with a Javelin and expended it, against orders, on the IFV, blowing it up in a massive fireball. The remaining aliens, forced back into the school, fired down desperately towards the human positions, daring them to attack the school and flush them out of their position. Pataki smiled, nodded to one of the missile teams, and watched as they launched a single missile right through one of the school windows. Judging from the size of the explosion, the aliens had been stockpiling ammunition inside for quite some time; if any of them had survived, it would be God’s own miracle.

“Get the prisoners,” he snapped. The aliens would respond harshly and, despite his belief that they were being attacked all over Texas, he knew that they didn’t dare stick around. “Squad Two; you’re on rearguard. The rest of you, fuck off; we’ll meet you at the rendezvous point, assuming we survive.”

“Yes, sir,” the former government worker said, rapidly packing up his mortar and retreating. Pataki rolled his eyes — he’d told the man never to call him ‘sir’ a dozen times and it still hadn’t taken — and watched grimly as the former prisoners were released and welcomed to the resistance.

“Time to take our leave,” he said, as Squad Two rapidly completed their work. The alien bodies — so far, no one had taken an alien alive, apparently — were being booby-trapped with grenades and a handful of mines. The aliens recovered all of their bodies, apart from the ones that had been spirited away by the resistance, and if they were lucky, they would kill a handful of aliens when they came to retrieve these bodies. The alien vehicles, he suspected, were well beyond repair. “Move out!”

They vanished back out into the silent night… except it wasn’t silent. The still night air could carry sound an amazing distance and he could hear, faintly, the sound of shots and fighting. In the distance, he could see new fires burning… and, when he looked up, he could see twinkling in the night sky. Something was happening up there, he was sure… but what?

The ground-based laser vehicle hadn’t been a great success in trials, Mikkel Ellertson knew, despite the best that the researchers could do. The laser was the most powerful built on Earth, so far, but it couldn’t slice through metal like a knife through butter; that, alas, was still in the realm of science-fiction. It could — and had — be used to trigger off missiles before they could impact on the ground, but it couldn’t be used to destroy alien spacecraft high above. If it could, it would have prevented the aliens from seizing control of Low Earth Orbit and the entire war would have gone very differently.

What it could do was damage sensitive components. Ellertson, a student of high technology since he’d been a little kid watching his father solder together a mass of components to produce something weird and wonderful, was certain that the alien space-based radars were actually quite fragile. If they were deployed in zero-gee, they could have been built without any of the limitations that ground-based systems hard, hardened against any kind of attack. The aliens thought that their radar system was untouchable… and, as far as missiles were concerned, they were right. A missile could destroy the station with ease, assuming that it reached the alien radar, but it would be burned out of space a long time before it reached attack range. The alien lasers could burn through steel, if not immediately.

“Target locked,” one of the technicians said. Ellertson shivered, despite himself; they couldn’t use active sensors to track the alien craft, but the alien radar was pumping out a formidable amount of energy with each sweep. It might as well have been taunting them; it was easy to track it, but far less easy to attack it. “Laser primed and ready.”

Ellertson picked up the field telephone. “We’re ready,” he said, without preamble. “Go?”

“Ten seconds from my mark,” the voice on the other end said. “Mark.”

Ellertson counted down the seconds. “Fire,” he barked, as soon as he reached zero. The humming from the laser truck grew louder, but there was no sign of any other effect; the laser beam was almost invisible in the air, although some people might see a hint of its presence. “Run!”

The laser was firing on automatic now. He could almost imagine the beam pumping energy into the alien system, vital components frying and being damaged, even as the alien craft zeroed in on the source of the attack. They sprinted as far as they could from the vehicles, knowing that the aliens would react swiftly to the attack, wondering which laser would be the first to go. There were a dozen stations pumping out laser fire, trying to take down the alien radar network before the aliens could react… and one of them would be the first hit. Perhaps…

The ground heaved and threw him through the air, smashing him into a rock. He felt, in slow motion, his bones start to break under the impact… and then darkness came for him. He almost welcomed it. Behind him, the laser truck had been almost completely obliterated by the alien strike.

The display had been showing the eerie red sweeps of the alien radars, both the space-based and ground-based systems, but now, one by one, they were blanking out. The operator turned to General Ridgley and gave him the thumbs up; the alien network had been knocked down, for now. They’d have a window of opportunity to hurt the aliens before they got their radar network set up again and started to strike back.

He lifted his field telephone and smiled. “All units, this is base,” he said. “Go!”

Captain William Morrigan, USN, checked the message slip against the codebook and winced. The USS Nebraska had been lurking in deep water ever since the aliens had started their invasion, hoping that they would have a chance to launch their missiles against a target in orbit, if not a target on the ground. The possibility that they might be called upon to nuke Texas had sparked some interesting debate in the wardroom, but most of the crew had understood that it would be their duty, although several seaman who had come from Texas had almost collapsed when they realised that they might have to kill their own families.

“I have an authorised launch code,” he said, once he had briefed the firing crew. He inserted his key into the launch system and waited. “Do you concur?”

One by one, the remaining four officers inserted their own keys. The order had been simple and, in some ways, it was almost a relief. They had to fire two missiles, programmed to detonate at high attitude and generate an EMP pulse, which would — hopefully — disrupt the aliens from counterattacking.

“Missile primed and launched,” he said, finally. The boat shook as the missile was discharged from its tube in a burst of pressurized gas. A moment later, its rocket engine ignited and propelled it towards space. The second missile followed moments later. “Helm, take us out of here, somewhere deep!”

The Russians had reported that the aliens had killed two of their ballistic missile submarines from orbit, Morrigan knew, and there was no point in taking chances. They had to run silent, run deep… and hope that the aliens were too occupied to fire back. The odds were in their favour, he hoped…

The MLRS truck had been carefully camouflaged and positioned only a short distance from the alien lines. Its crew had been amazingly lucky to get as close as they had, although given that the MLRS looked fairly harmless from the air, it might have simply been mistaken for a truck and ignored. The aliens might have worked hard to prevent human vehicles from moving within the red zone, but there were so many vehicles of all kinds in the United States that destroying them all from orbit might have expended all of their projectiles. They still shot at tanks and other obviously military vehicles, but they tended to leave civilian vehicles alone, unless they presented a very temping target. The railroads had been almost completely shut down by the aliens, so the truck was being used to move food and supplies across the United States… and military gear. The logistics were interesting and, in places, hung by a shoestring.

The aliens hadn’t created a World War One-style network of trenches and so there was a ‘no man’s land’ between their positions and the human forces, gathering in strength. Both sides were uneasily aware that they could be attacked at any moment, and the aliens had insurgents to worry about, and so the border had been surprisingly peaceful, although the KEWs had continued to fall. The aliens had been fairly confident of their ability to defeat any conventional attack and so… they might, the crew hoped, have grown a little overconfident.

Time to show them the error of their ways, the commander thought, as he made the final checks on his vehicle. The briefing had warned that the alien parasite ships would have something else to worry about, but they couldn’t rely on that. He smiled, briefly, as the sky lit up with a blinding glow in the distance. The first of the nukes had detonated. That explained why the higher-ups had thought that the aliens would be distracted, although no one knew how much EMP shielding the alien technology mounted. What little had fallen into human hands had been crude, but functional. That hadn’t stopped them tearing the guts out of the USA — or, for that matter, the rest of the world.

“Fire,” he ordered. The MLRS elevated to launch position and started to fire. Illuminated by the flare of the rockets, the crew ran for their lives, abandoning their vehicle. The aliens might still be able to react, somehow. He watched, as they reached their pre-prepared bunker, as the rockets continued to fly towards the alien base. They looked to have been completely surprised. Their lasers weren’t even burning the rounds out of the air. A moment later, he started to hear explosions as the rounds came down in the alien positions, shattering their defences.

Operation Lone Star had begun.