The Trojan Horse

Chapter Forty-One

Washington DC

USA, Day 73

“Fire,” Mathew ordered.

It had taken hours to slip the assault force close to Andrews. The aliens had been on the watch for insurgents and even the SEALs had felt their skills tested to the limit. A handful of collaborator uniforms and access papers had allowed others to get close to the base, but they’d been very limited in what they could carry with them. The aliens had refused their collaborators anything heavier than their M16s, which was helpful for the resistance, but less useful for attacking Andrews ABF. They’d had to break down the mortars and carry them in to the right position.

The seven mortars fired as one, launching shells towards the base. They came down on top of the guardpost, one of them landing right on top of an alien position. Thankfully, as Mathew had prayed, there was no massive explosion vaporising the alien bodies. The aliens clearly had no interest in seeing their troops destroyed by their own weapons. They’d punish the attack on their soldiers if they had time… Mathew pushed the thought aside and barked orders. The snipers opened fire, targeting every enemy — human or alien — they could see. Meanwhile, the Mortar teams fired a second salvo and then scrambled to shift position. The enemy might have been surprised, but they’d recover… and then they’d track the shells back to their point of origin and target it for destruction. If the US could — and did — take out enemy positions with counter-battery fire, why couldn’t the aliens?

He advanced forward, trusting his men to know what they were doing. The alien collaborators were clearly trying to get armoured vehicles out to drive away the insurgents. It wasn’t such a bad idea, except Mathew and his men had brought Javelin antitank weapons to the party. The moment they came out into the open, they’d die. Mathew regretted the deaths of the pod people — they had no choice, but to serve the aliens — but he would have no hesitation about terminating as many collaborators as possible. They all deserved to die.

And they had no idea that Mathew’s attack, as violent and unexpected as it was, was really nothing more than the diversion. All he had to do was keep them focused on him for as long as possible…

“Incoming helicopters,” one of his men bellowed. In the lightening sky, two helicopters could be seen, swooping down towards the insurgent positions. Mathew had called in fire from Apache helicopters before, back when he’d been in Afghanistan. Being on the receiving end was not fun. On the other hand, he did have better antiaircraft weapons than the Taliban had ever dreamed of having. “Sir…”

“Break out the Stingers,” Mathew ordered. “Take them both down.”

The helicopters had barely opened fire when the Stingers were launched. One helicopter didn’t recognise the threat until the missile had slammed into its underbelly and blown it into a colossal fireball. The second danced upwards, launching flares, but they’d left it far too late and the missile struck home. For a long moment, Mathew thought that the pilot would manage to put the bird on the ground safely, before he lost control and the helicopter crashed into the base. The fireball illuminated the surroundings as the craft exploded. No one made it out alive.

A light in the sky revealed itself to be one of the alien craft. It skimmed low over the ground, launching pulse after pulse of green light into the insurgent positions. Mathew was lucky; one of the blasts barely missed him by several meters. The explosion threw dust and grit through the air. One of the antiaircraft team launched a Stinger after the aircraft craft, but it spun on its tail and neatly picked off the missile with a burst of green light. Mathew would have been impressed if he hadn’t known that the craft’s presence meant that his attack had nearly come to a halt. The Colonel wouldn’t have the time he needed to take the alien craft…

“Now,” the Colonel ordered.

His assault force opened fire. The aliens and their collaborators hadn’t been expecting an attack from the rear. They fell below his fire, allowing his men to run towards the alien shuttle, two of them dragging a heavy crate behind them. The aliens in the shuttle had no time to react as the commandos burst in through the hatch, followed rapidly by the Colonel himself. He’d feared that the aliens would destroy their craft rather than risk it falling into enemy hands, but instead they raised their hands in surrender. The Colonel and his men searched them roughly, and then pushed them outside to the trucks. If they could take the prisoners out of the base, they might be worth their weight in gold.

The Colonel took a moment to look around the shuttle’s interior as his men manhandled the crate up to the hatch. It was cruder than he’d expected, something not unlike a military-designed landing craft. A handful of alien seats, a set of controls that looked simple, but needed an alien to operate… for a moment, he felt an odd kinship with the alien soldiers. Some truths transcended race, creed or religion. If they’d met in honest battle, he could even have respected the aliens. Who knew what would happen in the future if the humans won the war and expanded into space?

“Colonel!”

The crate opened, revealing the alien defector. He looked alive and well; the Colonel, who would have hated to be confined for so long, had worried that he would be tired or unwell. The Snakes didn’t seem to mind confined spaces, luckily. He waved the alien forward and the defector took the seat at the front of the craft. One light was blinking alarmingly on the control panel and he flicked a switch. The light stopped blinking and vanished.

“Can you fly this thing?” The Colonel demanded. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” the alien rasped. He was flicking other switches; the Colonel felt, rather than heard, a growing hum of power within the craft. “Get your men onboard. They’re demanding that we take off at once to get away from the battle.”

The ground shook as the alien craft high overhead made another pass. “Come on,” the Colonel bellowed. “Let’s go!”

Toby stumbled as he climbed out of the President’s personal armoured transport. Andrews AFB had become a nightmare. Air Force One was burning, while enemy soldiers were shooting at two different groups of insurgents and alien troops were running towards them to provide support. No… they were shooting at the collaborators and pod people! For a moment, Toby didn’t understand what he was seeing, and then it struck him. The aliens couldn’t tell the difference between their brainwashed slaves, their collaborators and the insurgents, so they were firing on all humans! He almost laughed, just before a bullet pinged off the vehicle just above him.

McGreevy’s head appeared in the hatch. “What is going on?” She demanded. Toby was mildly surprised that she hadn’t shut the hatch and cowered inside the vehicle. The driver and his assistant were already dead, even though they were well-protected. Toby wasn’t sure what had happened to them. “What’s happening?”

Toby almost laughed, despite the bullets and green flashes of light passing through the air. “The base is under attack,” he said. There was a roar from the direction of the alien shuttle, just before it leapt into the air. Toby knew that his father had intended to lead the mission in person. He’d see Earth from orbit, something Toby had once known that he would never see, and then he would board the alien warship. “I think you ought to run to the aliens.”

McGreevy, moving with surprising speed, jumped out of the hatch and started to run. Toby watched as she fled towards the aliens, half-expecting to see a bullet crack into her back. Instead, one of the aliens lifted his weapon and snapped off a shot at her. Her body glowed green for a second, and then she collapsed on the ground, dead. The alien ran over her body and kept moving. They hadn’t known who was running towards them — and probably wouldn’t have cared if they had. She’d definitely outlived her usefulness.

“Hey, kid,” a voice said. Toby started, and then saw Harry Garland, one of his father’s younger friends. “Not too bad, eh?”

He passed Toby a pistol and motioned for him to prepare to fight. “Time to start falling back, kid,” he added. “One way or another, we’ve done all we can here.”

The Colonel cursed as he felt the gravity shifting around him. He dropped to the deck as the pressure grew stronger, just before it ebbed to almost nothing. Instead, he felt vaguely dizzy, as if something was badly wrong with his inner ear. The defector seemed to be unaffected, but it was clear that the rest of his troops were feeling the same effect. It had to be an effect of the craft’s drive, he told himself. Any human spacecraft travelling at such speed would have left them feeling squashed as long as the rocket was firing.

He pulled himself to his feet, feeling oddly as if his body was drunk, and settled down next to the defector. Outside, the sky was dimming to black and all the stars were coming out. He looked out of the viewport and down towards Earth. It spun in the inky blackness of space, seemingly unaffected by the billions of humans — and Snakes — who dwelled on its surface. The Colonel had almost walked away from religion after Mary had died, but looking down on Earth, he knew there was a God. Someone had created the Earth, and the human race, and the Snakes. There was an entire universe just waiting for humanity to explore. But then, God helped those who helped themselves. If the human race didn’t prove itself worthy of survival…

“That’s it,” the alien defector said. “That’s the warship.”

It came into view slowly, illuminated only by the reflected light from Earth. Unlike some of the science-fiction ships he’d seen on television, it was a blocky shape, clearly military in design. It’s hull was studded with blisters he suspected were weapons, moving around in seemingly random patterns. It was larger than a battleship, larger than an aircraft carrier… far larger than anything humanity had ever put in space. The Colonel found himself speechless as it grew and grew. How could they hope to defeat the beings who had created such ships while humanity struggled to put a single rocket into space? Maybe they were doomed after all.

“Take us in towards it,” the Colonel ordered. “We need to dock with them.”

He shared a long glance with his men. No words were needed. They all knew what had to be done. The Colonel pulled off his rucksack and opened it, revealing the device hidden inside. It had taken days of careful work to remove the PAL and prepare the nuke to detonate on command, but it had worked — he hoped. A great deal of ingenuity had gone into creating devices that would prevent nukes falling into the wrong hands and bypassing them was tricky. It certainly wasn’t intended to be easy.

A hissing sound filled the cabin. “They’re demanding explanations,” the defector said. “One moment…”

He produced a second set of hissing sounds. The Colonel shivered, remembering — once again — why humans had termed the aliens Snakes. There was something utterly inhuman about their speech, something that sent a chill down their spine. Mr. Spock and Chewbacca had been barely distinguishable from humans, at least when compared to the Snakes. And it worried him that he had no way of knowing what they were saying to each other. The defector might have had a change of heart. Not for the first time, he cursed the lack of any independent verification.

“They’re ordering us to dock, but not to enter the ship,” the defector said. “Apparently there was some kind of contamination down below and they’re worried about it spreading into the warship.”

The Colonel exchanged glances with his men. Contamination? “Can they pick up human life signs in this craft?”

“I don’t think so,” the defector said. His raspy voice was difficult to understand — or pick out emotion — but the Colonel suspected that he was worried. “They don’t seem to be suspicious of us personally…”

The Colonel nodded. “Take us in to dock,” he ordered. Inside his bag, the nuke was ready to detonate. “Hurry.”

He watched as the alien warship became a wall stretching across the sky, until its immensity swallowed up everything else. It was huge; every time he thought he comprehended the vast scale of the craft, he saw something to throw his mind back into a spin. The weapons blisters were larger than the space shuttle, prepared for a war against aliens with comparable technology. It still struck him as odd that the aliens hadn’t armed their freighters and transports, but perhaps it made a certain kind of sense. They wouldn’t want to run the risk of rebellion in their ranks. And they did have enemies within. The Pacifists seemed more than willing to fight, despite their name. They just needed a chance to actually take on the Emperor and win.

The dull thud caught him by surprise. “We have docked,” the defector announced. There was a pause as more hissing filled the cabin. “They’re sending an inspection party…”

Behind him, the hatch started to hiss open. The Colonel rammed his finger down onto the nuke and pressed the button, holding it down. A moment later, the hatch opened, revealing a team of alien soldiers. They stared at the humans, shocked beyond words. The Colonel understood how they felt. He wouldn’t have expected to encounter humans on an alien shuttle either. And he’d always known that it would be a one-way trip.

The Colonel smiled and let go of the button.

Toby saw the flash of white light from high above as the remains of the assault group retreated from Andrews AFB. The nuke had detonated, he knew; the Colonel, his father, had taken it along as a last resort. If they failed to take the alien warship, they’d blow it up. God alone knew what had happened in those last few moments, but the aliens had just lost their commander and their biggest stick.

He pulled himself away from his escort and stared towards the Snakes. They looked… stunned, exchanging glances and hisses with one another. It was easy, for once, to read their faces. All of a sudden, the threat of massive reprisals wouldn’t be enough to save their scaly butts… and their collaborators had turned on them. Or so they thought. Toby realised that there would never be a better opportunity to take them alive.

“Hold fire,” he bellowed. He had no authority to command his father’s troops, but they obeyed, a handful of NCOs passing on the command. “Surrender!”

He walked towards the aliens, feeling his heart trying to climb into his mouth. If they opened fire, even a blind man couldn’t have missed him at such a range. The aliens looked up at him, but did nothing. Toby said a silent prayer under his breath and stopped, bare metres from the aliens.

“Your warship is gone,” he said, flatly. What if their voders had failed? They wouldn’t be able to understand him, let alone answer. “Surrender now and we’ll treat you well.”

There was a long pause, and then the lead alien threw his gun to the ground. The others followed suit, seconds later. Toby let out a long breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding and waved the soldiers forward. The alien prisoners were surrounded, their weapons were taken and they were marched off to a makeshift detention facility. No pod people were left alive, but a handful of collaborators were captured and added to the haul. Toby allowed himself a sigh of relief and headed off towards the vehicles. Someone had to return to the White House and liberate it from the aliens and their collaborators.

“I’m detailing an escort,” Garland said. “The General will want to see you, kid. You did good.”

General Thomas had set up his command post on the outskirts of Washington. The news was coming in from all over the world. Most of the aliens had surrendered, along with their pod people, to the local resistance. Some countries had gone all the way down into chaos, but those that had survived would have their own tame aliens. The alien prisoners, at first report, seemed to have no qualms about sharing what they knew with their captors. They were probably afraid to face the human race after all they’d done.

The remaining alien starships had surrendered after their warship had been destroyed, leaving the human race with the problem of getting troops onboard before it occurred to one of the aliens to ram the planet and ensure that the human race didn’t survive long enough to threaten their empire. One of their other bases had included a handful of shuttles, which had been used to move SF forces up to the starships and take command. A handful of other Pacifists had come out of the woodwork, helping the humans to take control of the ships. The defector’s final gift to humanity. Codes that could be used to make contact with the others in his group.

General Thomas shook his head. The alien government was falling apart, now that McGreevy was dead and her collaborators being hounded out of office or lynched on the streets. A new government would have to be established quickly, or large parts of the country wouldn’t survive the winter. And then they would have to bury the dead and start rebuilding the country.

But they’d won, he told himself. The human race had won. And the Snake Empire was in for a nasty shock when they encountered the human race for a second time.

So why did it feel so much like defeat?