Invasion

Chapter Thirty-Six

The High Priest watched with a kind of numb horror as the nuclear warheads detonated. The American use of the warheads had not been anticipated, not in such surroundings. The analysis of the human mindset had suggested that they were terrified of their own weapons, to the point where only two had ever been deployed on their homeworld, until now. The researchers had interviewed countless humans and most of them had regarded nukes as an unbeatable horror, a crutch for the entire human race. They had believed that they would never be used.

In hindsight, the trap was easy to see. The humans probably had nukes buried all around the occupied zone. They’d lured the warriors into a trap and detonated the nukes, catching thousands of his people in the blasts. Some would have been on the fringes of the explosion and survived, but most of the force, almost ten thousand warriors and their vehicles and equipment, would have been killed. It was the most serious loss that they’d suffered since making landfall on Earth.

He had feared — and taken precautions against — nuclear weapons being deployed against either of the footholds. The Americans, in particular, had plenty of nuclear weapons, although interrogation and intelligence work hadn’t revealed many precise details, and seemed to dislike the inhabitants of the Middle East. The High Priest had expected to see the Americans firing missiles into the Middle East, and had deployed his forces and parasite ships to counter such a move, but instead… instead, they had used nukes on their own soil, the one thing most of the prisoners had believed that they would never do.

But, he thought, they probably had the entire area evacuated.

He’d followed the battle carefully and noted that the warriors hadn’t encountered any human civilians. They’d been ambushed and delayed by humans sniping from cover, or booby-traps that had taken out a few vehicles or warriors, but they hadn’t encountered any civilians. It wasn’t easy, to be fair, to tell the difference between human civilians and human warriors — the Americans and Middle Eastern humans seemed to have a fetish for weapons, something that was alien to non-warriors- but as a general rule, anyone shooting at the warriors was a soldier. There had been thousands of them, delaying the advance… and baiting the trap. There was a first-class mind over there, the High Priest decided; a first-class mind with a willingness to use his own people to bait a trap.

The War Leader waited for the High Priest to finish his meditations. If Guiding Star itself had come under attack, he would have reacted at once, but at the moment, there was little need for hasty action. If the humans had taken out the parasite ships floating high overhead, they could have used the chaos caused by their nukes to really hurt the foothold, but they’d left them alone. It still struck the High Priest as funny that a race with so many advancements and other surprises had done so little with space, but it was clearly a sign of divine favour, a blessing that would allow them to bring Earth under their control and lead their race to newer heights. There were researchers, even now, working on captured human technology, some of which promised uses even beyond what the humans had imagined. As a race, they were even more imaginative than the Takaina; he’d been astonished to discover, from one of the researchers, that some humans had even plotted out the course of the war a long time before they’d even known that they weren’t alone in the universe. And yet… what had they done to prepare for it?

The High Priest turned to face his subordinate. “How many of our people were killed?”

“Preliminary data suggested seven thousand warriors have been killed or seriously injured,” the War Leader said. He sounded nervous and well he might; it wasn’t unknown for unsuccessful commanders to be burnt at the stake by the Inquisitors, as failure in battle was often taken as a sign of sin. The commander on the ground was probably considering honourable suicide right now, assuming that he hadn’t been caught up in the blasts and killed. “The line is being re-established and our forces are being pulled back to regroup.”

“And effectively abandoning the advance,” the High Priest said. He kept his own voice under careful control. The last thing he needed, now, was to hear what they thought he wanted to hear. He had to heat honest advice… just for a moment, he wished that the War Leader was a sterile female, as blasphemous as the thought was. It might have been easier to get advice then. “How should we react to the human action?”

“They have killed enough of us to force us to redeploy,” the War Leader said. The High Priest nodded impatiently. It was true that seven thousand was considerably less than a billion, but as part of the force deployed to hold the American occupied zone, it was a serious loss. If the humans had had the capability to mount a counterattack, it might have proven decisive. “They cannot destroy the foothold, but we can no longer advance, at least without redeploying additional vehicles and warriors to the area.”

And those we deploy there from orbit we cannot recover quickly, the High Priest thought. Getting them down was easy. Getting them back up was much harder. The logistics alone argued against further deployment, but with the preparations for settlement, they had to strengthen their position. The human insurgency had swelled up again and additional soldiers were needed. Moving one unit of warriors from an occupied and — supposedly — pacified area meant that it very rapidly turned out not to be pacified after all. Some genius of an Inquisitor had decided to take all the children from a small town to be brought up in a religious training centre… and the entire town had risen in rebellion. They had all had to be slaughtered.

The situation was even worse in the Middle East. The natives there were even more bent on protecting their religion than the Americans. They came at the occupying forces, dying in vast numbers… and yet they kept fighting. Warriors who’d never experienced real fighting found themselves learning on the job… and discovering how much their training hadn’t prepared them for. They were learning fast, and plenty of humans were dying before they could pass on their own lessons, but it was still becoming well past uncontrollable. He was confident that, when settlement began, they would bring the area firmly under their control, but the humans there were so unreliable. They had kept oil workers working — for them — only to discover that a handful of them had betrayed their new employers. It meant that developing the entire region would take time, time they didn’t have.

“We need to respond harshly and decisively,” the High Priest said, firmly. The use of nuclear weapons against his forces was a dangerous threat… and one that had to be prevented, whatever the cost. If the humans got the idea that they could use nukes without any serious consequences, they would start smuggling them into the footholds and destroying them… and the war would be within shouting distance of being lost. If they started to use their nukes on the settlements, they would slaughter thousands of settlers, even the females. “None of our prior wars have been anything like this…”

He looked over at the War Leader. “We will strike them hard,” he said. “I will order the Inquisitors to take out one of their cities. They will not be permitted to use nukes without a mass slaughter of their civilians in response.”

Washington just wasn’t what it had once been, Patrolman Keith Glass decided, as he ambled down one of the streets. In some ways, the city was safer than it had ever been, patrolled not only by the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia, but by countless neighbourhood watches, guardian angels and self-help protective associations. The streets might have been almost empty of traffic, but they were also empty of drug dealers, thieves and rapists. In theory, none of the associations had any law enforcement powers, although some of them had been deputised by the police, but in practice they tended to drive away undesirable people. The streets had never been safer and children, enjoying the quiet streets, played freely with their friends. As Glass passed a park, he waved cheerfully towards some of the other patrollers, receiving everything from a wave to a salute in return.

He checked his gun and other equipment out of habit as he turned down a new street. The people who’d lived in about half of the houses on this row had deserted the city and gone to live in the countryside, where they’d had relatives who farmed. Looters had tried to steal their worldly goods in the chaos following the invasion, but they’d been arrested and shipped to prison camps somewhere outside the city. There were high-priced lawyers arguing that the looters hadn’t received a fair trial, which was true enough, but Glass, who’d been there when they’d been arrested, wasn’t sympathetic. As far as he was concerned, if the looters spent the rest of their lives in a work camp, they deserved everything they got. They hadn’t needed the televisions, computers and jewels that they’d tried to steal, but had merely wanted to sell them on the black market. They were hardly starving misguided kids.

The noise of a passing car caught his attention and he smiled. The police were still allowed some of their patrol cars, but not many of them, while only the fire and ambulance services were allowed unlimited fuel. Civilians didn’t get any fuel unless they had a really pressing need, while the handful of Army vehicles in the centre of the city — he believed — got as much as they needed. Glass didn’t begrudge them that, even though he rather missed his own car; if the aliens landed in Washington, they were going to need all the fuel they could get. He looked upwards, into the clear sky, and shook his head. There hadn’t been any aircraft flying overhead since the invasion had begun. It reminded him, too much, of the days just after 9/11.

His radio bleeped once, a noise he hadn’t heard outside the drills; air raid alarm. A second later, the sirens that had been rigged up started to blare, warning that the city itself was under attack. Glass threw himself to the ground, remembering Rome and how the entire city had been destroyed, and crawled as fast as he could towards shelter. There was no bomb shelter, as far as he knew, in the area, but if he could just get some cover…

The shockwave blasted over his head. If he hadn’t been sheltered, it would have killed him, either directly or by picking him up and throwing him against a wall. The fury seemed endless, and, before he could even catch his breath, the firestorm roared past. He found himself praying, desperately, as the storm raged past him, his mind summoning up visions of radioactive poisoning and worse. It ended, suddenly, and a torrent of noise crashed into his mind. He could hear and smell burning…

He pulled himself to his feet, feeling his body tremble, and stopped dead. The entire street was devastated. Buildings had been shattered, windows had been smashed, cars had been thrown over and set on fire… the sight was impossible to grasp as anything, but a collection of separate images. Burning vehicles, smoke and flame rising from all over the city… and a towering mushroom cloud, billowing up in the air. The aliens had spared the White House in earlier attacks, for some reason, but now… now, unless he was wrong, the aliens had chosen it as ground zero. The damage was so absolute, the entire city reduced to rubble, that he couldn’t even see where to begin. As far as he could see, he was alone in the city, the only survivor of the blast. He checked his radio, hoping against hope that it would work, but it was dead. Either the EMP or the landing on the ground had knocked it out.

It was agony to move — he’d been wounded by the shockwave, although not badly — but he managed to walk down towards the end of the street. It was growing harder to breathe as smoke and flames built up, fires spreading rapidly from house to house, while there was nothing to stop them. He remembered vaguely that nuclear blasts sent out a wave of heat that set everything on fire, or thought he did; it was hard to think of anything practical in the midst of so much devastation. He might have been completely wrong; perhaps the nuke had simply triggered off horded fuel, or maybe…

The screams pulled him back to himself. They were coming from only a short distance away and he forced himself to run towards them. When he reached the house, he discovered a young black girl, her face brutally scared by… something. Blood ran down her cheeks, marring what remained of what had once been a fashionable outfit, while one eye looked to have been sealed shut. Glass was no stranger to violence on the Washington streets, but he’d never quite seen anything like it, not even in a horror movie. The movies couldn’t detail the sheer horror of a nuclear blast against unprepared civilians.

“It’s ok,” he lied, catching on to her hand and gently checking the remainder of her body. She was well beyond his ability to treat; he realised, numbly, that she needed a proper hospital. It crossed his mind that it would be kinder to snap her neck now, but he pushed that thought away with an angry curse. “I’m a policeman; I’ll get you out of here, somehow.”

“You can’t,” the girl said, and gasped into a fresh round of sobs. “There’s nowhere to go.”

It was deathly quiet in the bunker.

Paul had expected that the aliens would retaliate in some form for the human use of nukes. It was their only real choice. Israel was probably on the verge of using them themselves, while they were pushing up against the Pakistani border and disrupting Europe’s development by holding the Middle East. They had to make an object lesson and, after Rome, no one had doubted that they had the capability. It would have been almost impossible to prevent them from striking back… and the alien craft that had bombed Washington had done so almost without being detected. That should have been impossible…

“The National Guard and the militia have been deployed to seal the area,” General Hastings said, his voice grim and very controlled. “They should start bringing people out of the city soon enough…”

“But where are we going to put them?” The President asked, bitterly. It was yet another shock to his system, Paul knew, one that might prove fatal. He had never expected to have to cope with a war on such a scale… and he’d been the one who had authorised the use of American tactical nukes. “How are we even going to save all the injured?”

We can’t, Paul thought. It was easy to say that there were so many hospitals, doctors, nurses and trained first-aid volunteers within the blast zone, but that hardly meant that they could handle such a catastrophe. The medical personnel would have been hit by the nuke as well, so they might need medical attention themselves, while all the normal effects of a nuclear blast would be taking their toll. Fires would be spreading out of control, roads would be blocked and rendered impassable… and people would be fleeing in their thousands in hopes of avoiding radiation poisoning. So far, at least, it seemed that the alien nukes weren’t that radioactive, but anyone caught up in the blast needed medical attention, attention they weren’t going to get. Worse, if they got out of the city carrying radioactive dust in their clothing, they might spread it further into the refugee camps.

It was barely half an hour after the nuke had detonated and the emergency services what was left of them, were already overwhelmed. The soldiers deployed around the city could bring out as many people as possible, but it would be almost impossible to save them all and, with the city destroyed, they might have to leave the fires to burn themselves out. That wouldn’t sit well with the President, but there was little other choice, not when it was so hard to get supplies from the rest of the country. They would have to save those who could be saved, which meant that thousands of people, trapped in the rubble, would just have to be abandoned.

“We will save as many as we can,” General Hastings promised. He leaned forward. “Mr President, we did prevent them from continuing their advance…”

The President gave him a bleak stare. “How many cities can we afford to trade off for preventing any further advance?” He asked. “Detroit? San Francisco? How many more?”

He rounded on Paul. “Colonel, get back to the prisoners,” he said. “Do whatever you have to do to get them working with us, just to use them, somehow, to get out of this mess.”

Paul couldn’t argue. He looked around the table and saw… a mixture. General Hastings, shocked, but determined to do whatever he needed to do. Spencer was terrified and furious at the destruction of his city. His family was somewhere within Washington, unless he’d gotten them out before the explosion. Deborah… watching the President the way a hawk watches a mouse, thinking hard.

“Yes, Mr President,” he said. He had the unnerving feeling that he was listening to the funeral bell for the United States of America. “I shall see to it at once.”