Invasion

Chapter Thirty-Five

Forty cycles — or six weeks, as humans reckoned time — after the first landings, WarPriest Allon felt that he had some grounds for relief. The first and second human insurgencies within the cities had been dangerous, and there was a constant series of attacks out in the countryside, including some that had been embarrassing, if not disastrous, but the grip on the occupied zone was fairly secure. The warriors had learned, quickly, that not all of the collaborators could be trusted, but they had enough to keep a lid on trouble. The occupation forces had been moved towards the human-controlled area, prepared for their advance further into the country called America, and enough forces had been deployed in the rear area to ensure security.

It had taken him longer than he had expected to obtain the High Priest’s consent to the advance, but really… there was little choice. A constant stream of soldiers, weapons and other equipment were flowing into the occupied zone from the remainder of America… and some of them were deadly indeed. The warriors patrolled the border, but it was a vast area of land and they discovered, quickly, that isolated units tended to come under attack. In fact, smaller units were used as bait to draw larger units into a bigger trap, sometimes leaving them with heavy casualties for nothing. There seemed to be an unlimited number of humans willing to fight directly, while he knew that his own strength was limited. With the massive landings in the Middle East and the insurgency there, the High Priest was unlikely to be willing to risk the foothold on America.

But there was no choice. The humans were very good at camouflage, but the observers high above had picked up on new human forces arriving along the borders. It was possible that they would launch a second major counterattack… and even through he knew that they wouldn’t be able to actually burn the Takaina out of Texas, they could launch spoiling attacks or even reinforce the insurgents. The handful of KEWs that had been used to hit likely targets had not, as far as he could tell, taken out anything vital; in fact, going by the human skill at deception, he had a nasty suspicion that half of them had been dropped on decoys. The humans were good at tricking automated systems.

He watched, for a long moment, the live feed from the orbiting cameras, and then issued the order. “Advance.”

They called it No Man’s Land.

Sergeant Darryl Tyler wiped his forehead as the small patrol made its way across the devastated country. Sage, his Atika-Husky bitch, looked up at him, her tongue hanging out, as if to ask why the patrol had stopped. Technically, the presence of a dog was against regulations, but Sage had saved their lives several times during the first battles with the aliens, if only howling to warn them of their advance. No man in the small patrol, or even in the entire army, would have refused to allow her to serve, despite what the rules said.

“Don’t worry,” he said, more to her than the rest of the men. The seven men and two women of the patrol had been on duty for several hours and it was getting hotter. “We’ll be on the road again soon.”

The Army’s defeat had scared hell out of the civilians, he reflected, as he peered into the distance, towards the Red Zone. Only the presence of a black helicopter, several kilometres away, warned him that anything was amiss. The civilians who were actually army-reservists had been drafted back into service, while the remainder had been evacuated from the area to somewhere safer, although there weren’t many places in the United States that could be termed as ‘safe’ these days. The Marine and Special Forces operators had been through a three-kilometre wide area and carefully rigged the entire zone with booby-traps. Lake Palestine was no longer a safe place for swimmers, while the towns had been converted into death traps. Snipers and survivalists lurked in the bushes, prepared to shoot any alien who so much as showed his face, even though most of the locals had been removed. They had wanted to stay and defend their homes, but instead they’d been removed. The army couldn’t take the risk of them falling into enemy hands.

Sage barked and gambolled around while the patrol checked around. The problem these days was simple; the aliens could come at them at any time, with very little warning. They moved awesomely fast on the ground, weren’t bothered by the destroyed or rigged bridges and radio transmissions tended to draw a strike from orbit. The Special Forces had rigged up a lot of dummy transmitters, trying to dissuade the aliens from taking pot shots at every transmitter, but still, using radio was dangerous. The patrol was, effectively speaking, on its own.

“Move out,” he said, and strode off, confident that his men would follow him. They were a confusing mixture of reservists, soldiers whose units had been destroyed in Operation Lone Star and even a pair of civilians who had somehow talked their way into a military unit, but they knew their stuff. If they were attacked, he was confident that they would manage to acquit themselves well. They marched up a hill, watching out for infiltrators… and saw, instead, a line of alien vehicles, advancing right towards Athens. They were coming directly up the road, their passage almost soundless, right towards the defence lines.

“Shit,” he snapped, and pulled a small radio out off his belt. Keying in a single command, he placed it down by a rock, and then led the patrol away from the radio. Thirty seconds after he’d left it, the radio sent a single burst transmission and then shut down. The aliens didn’t bother to destroy the radio from orbit; the odds were, he decided, that they had already started to jam the human communications. When they decided to put on a blitzkrieg, they were almost unstoppable. “Come on.”

He led the patrol down towards a possible ambush point. They could have retreated into one of the hidden outposts the Army Engineers had scattered around the cleared zone, but that wasn’t in his nature. He knew that there was little that they could do to slow the aliens, despite the mines and suchlike that had been left in the area, but they had no choice, but to try. The aliens were not going to break through the lines without a fight.

In the distance, he could see the light of falling KEWs. Overhead, a seemingly endless swarm of enemy helicopters passed, heading towards the human lines. The aliens were definitely on the move… and all they could do was die bravely. By now, they probably couldn’t even make it back to the human lines.

“It’s confirmed, sir,” the aide said. “We’re looking at a major push from the Red Zone.”

“Thought so,” General Ridgley admitted, as he peered at the map in front of him. One advantage of working in relatively static lines, even if they had to keep it very low key to avoid attracting alien interest, was that they could rig up a whole new battlespace communications network. It wasn’t as capable as the one they’d enjoyed prior to the invasion, but at least it allowed him some additional control over events. The sensors they’d scattered throughout the cleared zone actually allowed them to track the aliens fairly closely, although not all of the readings made sense. “They’re heading for Athens?”

“Yes, sir,” the aide said. “At last report, they’ll be there in at least half an hour, unless the traps and snipers delay them more than expected.”

“True,” General Ridgley agreed. “Send the signal to the President, son; tell him that I intend to put the Omega Plan into use.”

“Yes, sir,” the aide said, and vanished towards the field telephones at the back of the bunker.

General Ridgley watched him go. He hadn’t wanted to discuss that with the President, not personally, because it was a decision that only the man on the spot could make. Athens, Texas, had once had a population of over ten thousand, a little irony that the General knew the aliens wouldn’t understand. Now, the citizens had been moved out and replaced with thousands of booby traps and a small army of Special Forces operatives to give them a hot reception. The small units that had been deployed around the city to harass the aliens wouldn’t stop them — nothing short of the 1^st Armoured Division would stop them, and that particular unit no longer existed — but hopefully they would lure the aliens into a city fight. Athens no longer had any innocents, it no longer had anyone to get mashed in the gears… and it had a final, unpleasant surprise for the aliens. If they reacted as he’d hoped…

They’d regret the day they chose to land in Texas.

“That was the President, sir,” the aide said. General Ridgley looked up, expectantly. “He said to hang fire as long as possible, then make it count.”

General Ridgley nodded.

The building had once been a fairly typical General Store, holding everything from canned food to clothes, guns and camping equipment. The citizens of Athens had gone through it in the days before the aliens had landed, buying the store out of almost everything, although Nguyen Gia Thai had been amused to discover that they’d abandoned some cheese that looked to be a violation of several anti-biological warfare treaties all by itself. The Vietnamese-American carefully climbed to the top of the store, following the safe ways his small unit had built into the structure, and watched as the aliens started to advance towards the city. The noise of fighting could be heard, drifting over the city in the dry air, and he hoped that the aliens were taking a beating. The briefing had strongly implied that no one, not even the commandos, would get out alive, but Nguyen had dared to hope. It looked, now, as through the hope had been misplaced.

Nguyen’s father had been a citizen, ironically enough, of North Vietnam. His sister had married an American soldier, who’d taken her and her family over the seas to America, after they’d realised that North Vietnam was hardly the paradise the Party promised. He’d learned English, taken on American jobs and married another Vietnamese exile, bringing up seven children, of whom Nguyen was the youngest. He’d been fascinated, at first, when he’d heard tales of how the United States had been beaten, even if he’d later discovered that the United States hadn’t lost to the Vietcong, or even the North Vietnamese Army, but to propaganda pushed out by Hanoi and eagerly licked up by American youth. Nguyen had joined the army during Desert Storm, been transferred to the CIA three years later, and then spent years helping other underground movements. It hadn’t been a rewarding task and he’d retired, only to be called back to service for war with an inhuman foe. It would be the crowning glory of his career.

“Come on,” he muttered, as the aliens probed up towards the city. They’d be expecting to be engaged at once, but apart from a handful of booby traps, the defenders had almost abandoned the outskirts of the city. The aliens had learned a little, however, sending in their infantry to flush out any possible attackers. They had to be a little mystified at the sudden absence of opposition, but…

BOOM! The explosion shattered an entire block. The defenders had carefully rigged up enough explosive in the sewers to shatter the area… and kill as many aliens as possible. The shockwave was so powerful that it knocked Nguyen to the rooftop, where he lay while the alien helicopters made their sweep over the city. He’d dressed to blend in with his surroundings, but without proper precautions, they might see him. They had other targets, however; the decoys they’d left around the city, showing up brightly on their instruments, were drawing fire. The aliens didn’t know it, but they were expending their ammunition for nothing. He rolled over to the side of the building and glanced through a crack towards the crater the explosion had left. It looked large enough to swamp an entire alien division.

The aliens were coming in, shooting. Nguyen knew that that was useless, but hoped they’d burn though their ammunition before they actually encountered live resistance. They were taking it more carefully now, but the explosion had revealed some of the underground network and they were sending in their infantry to probe for other booby-traps. More of them seemed to be swarming in from nowhere — they couldn’t allow a human force to remain in Athens, threatening their supply lines — and joining the hunt for the human defenders. Smiling to himself, Nguyen rolled back over to the hatch, slipped down into the store, and headed carefully towards the next observation point. As he left the building, careful to remain under cover, he flipped a switch and closed the door.

When an alien patrol opened it, ten minutes later, the C4 exploded. They died instantly.

“Here they come,” the commander breathed. “Wait for it… wait.”

The crew of the small Bradley Linebacker had known, almost as soon as they’d been told the mission, that they probably wouldn’t get out of it alive. There simply weren’t many military vehicles left in the combat zone and if they tried to manoeuvre they would reveal their existence to the aliens, who would stomp on them from orbit. Their vehicle had, in fact, been due for retirement, but fortunately it hadn’t been scrapped before the invasion began. The experts who’d hidden the vehicle, under cover of darkness, in Athens had warned them that they would get one free shot, and then the aliens would know that they were there. Remaining with the vehicle would prove fatal.

“Got them,” he said, after a long moment. He keyed a command into the console and watched as it blinked up an ‘OK’ signal. They were committed now; for a moment, they would be out of sight, but within seconds, the alien helicopters would over-fly their location. “Go!”

The three men didn’t hesitate; they ran for their lives into the warehouse and down into the basement. If they were lucky, they might make it out of the city alive, although the commander doubted it. They had bare seconds to act now… and the aliens had surrounded the city before starting to storm it. If they thought anything like humans, they’d have taken hundreds of casualties and they’d be in an evil mood. The commander switched on the air-tracking system, toggled the automatic fire switch, and dived out of the vehicle, running for his life. Behind him, the four mounted Stinger missiles rotated towards the sky, tracking the alien helicopters, and were launched into the air. The commander hit the ground as the fourth missile was launched, right into the teeth of the enemy formation, the sound of explosions suggesting that they’d hit something. A secondary explosion and a shockwave that passed through the ground showed that at least one of the helicopters had been hit and crashed. If they’d been lucky, they’d hit a different helicopter with each missile.

He pulled himself to his feet and kept running. The Bradley was out of missiles now, but the aliens didn’t know that. He was still running when the KEW came down and smashed the Bradley, the warehouse and collapsed the underground tunnels. He died without knowing just how successful he’d been.

Under War Priest Aflaha was in a furious mood. “Get the additional forces brought up and break into that damned city of heretics,” he thundered at his subordinates. He’d been running the battle directly from his command vehicle, very aware of his responsibilities… and he felt as if he were losing. The War Priest had commanded that the city — the humans called it Athens — be taken, but somehow it was stalling his most powerful thrusts. “I want it taken before dark!”

The humans had barely showed themselves, but they were delaying his advance, step by step. Rockets had been fired from cover, nasty bouncing mines had revealed themselves and damaged and destroyed tanks, insurgents had mounted sneak assaults on his supply units… it was turning into a nightmare. Some of the smaller human habitations had been rigged to be lethal traps; he’d come to the point where he was ordering them all levelled, just to prevent more of his warriors from being lost. He wasn’t losing, but the High Priest was not going to be happy…

“Push on,” he snapped, to a question. Taking the city was the only way he would redeem himself. “Take that city!”

General Ridgley carefully opened the small box, mounted on the single console, and pulled the key from around his neck. It looked so… small, barely more than the key to a teenage girl’s diary, but it commanded unimaginable destructive power. He tried to analyse his own feelings as he placed the key within the device and turned it, but it was impossible. A dull inhuman calm had come over him. The key opened a second section within the device, this one demanding a fingerprint scan, and he placed his thump to the scanner. A moment later, a single click revealed that the device was now functioning.

“Sound the warning,” he ordered, checking his watch. The soldiers on the line, if line it could be called, would have what warning he could give them. “Five minutes, mark.”

All around the area, they would be abandoning the fight and diving for cover. The aliens might wonder why, or perhaps they wouldn’t notice, but it no longer mattered. He inserted the second command, watching as the timer ran down…

And seven nuclear bombs, the first nuclear weapons detonated in anger on American soil, exploded as one.