Their Darkest Hour

Chapter Twelve

Near Salisbury Plain

United Kingdom, Day 2

“Coming through clear as day, sir,” the technician reported. “It seems that the Yanks were right and the bastards can’t track microburst transmissions.”

Brigadier Gavin Lightbridge-Stewart nodded. They hadn’t been able to pull much information from the ongoing war in the United States, but the Americans had apparently had some success with stealth aircraft and UAVs. The SAS had been loaned a Shadow Hawk UAV by the CIA to support British troops operating in the Middle East and it had survived the bombardment of British bases across the mainland. It was currently orbiting high over Basingstoke, watching the alien land forces heading west, and relaying what it saw to the mobile command post.

A small alien detachment had apparently been ordered to lay siege to Reading, with alien troops taking up positions on the roads and discouraging civilians from escaping by firing over their heads. Despite that, a vast number of refugees had managed to leave the cities and towns and were currently scattered all over the area, often causing confusion and delays for the British military. The aliens seemed to have fewer problems, if only because their standard response to anyone trying to get in their way was to open fire. Their hover-tanks — or so the young soldiers on the front lines had dubbed them — seemed to combine the armour of a Challenger tank with the speed and agility of a far lighter vehicle. It hadn’t escaped Gavin’s sense of irony that they’d overrun Woking with terrifying speed. If their infantry hadn’t been slower than their tankers, they might well have crushed the remaining British defences before they’d had time to regroup.

Part of his mind mulled over what the alien technology and observed capabilities seemed to suggest about their motives. They’d come as an army of occupation and they’d obviously come loaded for bear, but they seemed to lack the flexibility that every Western army tried to drill into its personnel. They seemed to have poor coordination between the armour and infantry, a problem that had caused many defeats in human history. In fact, given a level playing field — with no orbiting starships ready to drop rocks on their heads — he was sure that the 1^st Armoured Division would have hammered the aliens. Their coordination between their aircraft, their ground forces and their spacecraft was surprisingly limited. It all suggested book-learning, rather than actual experience — and yet they were clearly experienced at taking control of their conquests. The speed with which they’d found collaborators and pressed them into service proved that beyond all doubt. It was all very odd.

But I bet the armies of Oliver Cromwell or King Charles would have had some problems understanding what we do as a matter of course, he thought, wryly. Maybe the logistics of an interstellar power worked differently to those on Earth. There were seven billion humans on the planet, but for all he knew the aliens had seven billion soldiers and the ability to deploy them to Earth. He rather hoped not, yet it remained a possibility.

“Contact the advance parties,” he ordered. At least they’d been able to set up some limited signalling capabilities. The aliens struck the source of any transmission very quickly, but his men had set up a series of expendable transmitters. “Tell them that they are cleared to engage at will.”

“I got the signal, boss,” one of the soldiers outside the Challenger II tank said. “The enemy are on their way.”

“Understood,” the Commander said. He’d never anticipated fighting an all-out war in the heart of the English countryside, but he was damned if he and his tank were to be found wanting when the shit hit the fan. “You lot had better scarper. We’ll be along presently.”

His tank and a handful of others had been involved in the exercises when the aliens had announced their presence by bombarding the garrisons around Salisbury Plain. Shocked and horrified, he’d rallied his men and reported in to the remaining military command structure and had been ordered to take up a position watching the A342. They’d used their remaining fuel getting there — it had been a nightmarish journey — but they’d made it. He now scanned the horizon waiting for the first alien tanks to come into view. They seemed to like human roads.

Absently, he patted the side of his Challenger. Pound for pound, the Challenger had a fair claim to being one of the best Main Battle Tanks in the world — when tested, during the invasion of Iraq, they’d performed brilliantly. As they were unable to retreat, he’d had his position heavily camouflaged and the tank’s engine switched off, leaving them — hopefully — undetectable. If they were wrong — if they’d been tracked during the night — they’d probably die before they knew what had hit them.

Suddenly, much faster than he’d expected, he saw the first alien tank heading up the motorway. He studied it with considerable interest, noting that it didn’t seem to have been designed to face a modern environment. Their armour hadn’t been much better than anything in the human arsenal, according to the reports from London, and it didn’t look as if they’d designed it to deflect incoming fire. Maybe they only ever faced handguns, he considered, or perhaps they rarely had to go one-on-one with enemy tankers. Or maybe… he shook his head. There was no time for speculation.

“Take aim,” he ordered, quietly. They’d get one shot, maybe two, and then they’d have to run for it. Their escorts had left a few surprises down below for the alien infantry when they finally came into view, but they wouldn’t be able to survive rocks dropped from orbit. “On my command, fire and then switch to the next target.”

“Understood, boss,” the gunner said. The tank’s heavy main gun rotated as it locked onto its target. “Ready when you are…”

“Fire,” the Commander barked. The Challenger shook as it fired a single shell towards the enemy tank. “Reload and…”

The enemy tank went up in a colossal fireball. “Good shot,” the Commander said, sharply. “Take aim… fire!”

A second enemy tank died, followed rapidly by a third. The fourth enemy tank returned fire, hurling a shell that went safely over their heads and came down somewhere in the distance. They ignored the chance to take out a fourth enemy target and climbed out of their vehicle, running for dear life. Another explosion shook the world around them as the enemy tank zeroed in on its target. The Commander felt a moment of contempt. He understood the rationale behind firing back as quickly as possible, but a human force wouldn’t have missed so many times. The aliens were out of practice…

He heard a whistling and then the world seemed to explode behind him, the force of the blast picking him up and hurling him into the ground at terrifying speed. His last thought was the brief hope that some of his crew might have escaped…

“Get moving, you idiots,” Tra’tro The’Stig shouted. The thrice-damned humans had shot up one of the infantry’s personnel carriers and instead of disembarking and taking the fight to their foes, the infantry unit inside was cowering. They’d never been under fire before, even in the exercises, but that was no excuse. “Get out before they hit you again!”

He cursed the humans again as the infantry unit finally started to disembark, half of them forgetting their training and looking as if they wanted to retreat at once. The humans had shown a positive gift for preparing the ground, with nasty traps and snipers scattered everywhere. If one of those human snipers happened to see a few dozen infantry without enough protection, he could wreak havoc without fear of retaliation.

“Get moving,” he yelled, again, pointing them towards the small cluster of large human buildings on the outskirts of a small town. The humans had hidden a small team there and if they moved quickly, they might manage to catch and kill the vermin before they escaped. Small human teams had hit the advancing force, inflicted some kills and then broken off, obviously trying to bleed the assault units without risking themselves unduly. “Kill the Karna-spawned devils before they kill you!”

A streak of lights fell to the ground some distance from their position, followed rapidly by a series of explosions that shook the world around him. The humans had made a stand — but in making a stand, they’d revealed their own location. At least they had no means to avoid bombardment from orbit, or the assault unit might have been chewed to ribbons before it finally broke through the human defences.

He led the charge at the human building, relying on speed to protect him from any human fire. Some of the infantry unit followed him, holding their own weapons at the ready, while others seemed stuck and unwilling to proceed further. The’Stig cursed their cowardice in the face of the humans, even as he tried to restrain some of the others from charging onwards. One of them ran through a doorway that seemed too large for mere humans, detonating a trap hidden within the building. His body was flung backwards and he landed on the ground, torn to bloody ribbons.

“You can’t trust anything human,” he snarled, angrily. A human vehicle seemed to be heading away from them, probably carrying the human soldiers who had stung his people so badly. He pointed his weapon at the vehicle and fired off a long stream of bullets, watching as they slashed through the human vehicle and killed its passengers. “Keep an eye on where you’re walking — and don’t relax, ever!”

The fighting seemed to be slacking off, but he knew that it was far from the end. They hadn’t beaten the humans at all, not really — they’d fallen back to new positions they’d prepared for the next engagement. He wanted to know what was happening with the other assault units, but there was no way to know — it wasn’t as if the Command Triad was going to bother to brief an ordinary infantry soldier. Rumour, however, suggested that there was fighting going on all over Earth. At least the humans would burn through their stockpiles of advanced weapons sooner rather than later. But of course they’d know that themselves…

He wanted to relax, but he didn’t dare, not when so many units had been mangled together. It crossed his mind that he had probably shown that he deserved promotion — not that anyone would have noticed. The commanders who should have been watching their troops for potential officers were either at the rear or had gotten themselves killed heroically. He wondered, absently, if the humans had the same problem. Maybe they weren’t so alien after all.

“Dirty murdering bastards,” Corporal Tommy O’Neill muttered to himself. From his vantage point, he could watch helplessly as an alien patrol stumbled over a group of human refugees — and murdered them in cold blood. The humans hadn’t even tried to fight, but it hadn’t mattered. They’d been shot down and their bodies left abandoned on the side of the road. “Dirty fucking filthy murdering bastards.”

He hadn’t known that the refugees were there either, until two of them had started to run. No doubt they’d thought that they were well-hidden, unaware that the war was about to break right over their hiding place. He cursed his own oversight as he prepared himself for the coming engagement, promising to make the aliens pay for what they’d done. Civilians tended to shy away from soldiers, at least in his experience, but it was his duty to protect them. And if he couldn’t protect them, he would at least avenge them.

It had taken several hours to lay the trap and it looked perfect, at least unless the aliens decided to start shooting human vehicles up at random. But even aliens from outer space had to have logistic needs; the briefing they’d received on the battle in London and other brief engagements between human and alien forces suggested that there was nothing magical about their weapons. They shot projectiles, just like human guns. Some of the troopers had wondered why the aliens — who could clearly cross space with ease — would limit themselves, but Tommy suspected that he knew the answer. Their weapons would be far simpler than directed energy ray guns right out of science-fiction. He smiled, feeling a moment of kinship with the aliens before it faded away. No doubt they’d had ‘wonder-weapons’ devised by boffins and tested in laboratories that hadn’t worked anything like so well in the field too.

He reached for the detonator as the aliens passed the single abandoned vehicle. Gambling that they wouldn’t know how to inspect the human-designed car, he’d stuffed it with explosives and laid a cord to the detonator, which he’d placed near his vantage point. Uncapping the safety, he waited until one of the alien tanks was right next to the car and jammed down on the button. The results surprised even him. A colossal explosion flipped the enemy tank right over and literally vaporised most of the alien infantry. The remainder looked stunned and disorientated. Tommy allowed himself a tight smile and picked up his rifle. A new alien patrol was advancing towards their stricken comrades, watching carefully for any more traps. Tommy took aim and opened fire. The lead alien staggered backwards, inhuman blood flowing from its forehead, while the remainder opened fire in Tommy’s general direction.

Poor shooting, he thought, as he moved to the next target. The aliens seemed to be learning quickly, although they seemed oddly reluctant to take cover. It took Tommy a moment to realise that they were scared of other booby traps, which was a crying shame — he hadn’t had time to set up any more. He fired a final shot and started to crawl backwards. He had already marked out an escape route back to the RV point and he intended to be gone before the aliens gave chase. And if they didn’t… well, that was good too.

“Go.”

Captain Danny Jackson knew that he was lucky to be alive. He and his wingman had been on exercises with the British Army when their base at Middle Wallop had been destroyed by the aliens. As far as he knew, the two Apache helicopters they were flying were the last in Britain — perhaps the last in the world. There had been some Apache helicopters in Afghanistan — although never enough — but the aliens had probably clobbered them too. Danny couldn’t do anything for his mates who were either dead or trying to fight their way out of a country that was probably swinging back under Taliban control, yet he could try to avenge them.

The two Apaches had been flown under cover of darkness to a location where they’d been hidden under camouflage netting, awaiting their chance to take the offensive. It seemed that they were about to get their chance; the aliens were shipping in more ground forces as they attempted to push their occupied zone further to the west. They were also shipping in armour — the direct feed from the orbiting UAV reported that there were at least fifty hover-tanks heading west — but the pilots had been given clear orders. Their principle targets were the alien troop carriers. If they were really lucky, they would kill a great many aliens who hadn’t realised that the safety offered by their vehicles was really nothing more than an illusion.

He took control of his aircraft and pulled her into the sky. There were no illusions about their chances of surviving the battle, but they were going to be operating right on top of the enemy forces. Surely, the aliens wouldn’t call in orbital strikes that would be dangerously close to their own forces. Or perhaps they would. Humans had done all kinds of horrible things to other humans in their long history and why shouldn’t the aliens do the same? What cause did humanity have to complain?

Because they’re not human, he thought, wryly. And because we didn’t pick a fight with them.

They flew low and fast, only coming up above the treetops when the alien troops came into view. Danny didn’t give them any time to recover from their surprise; he took the Apache in a firing run right over the alien position, allowing his gunner to unleash hell on the aliens. There was no time to aim properly, but it hardly mattered — the only targets on the ground were hostile. Hellfire missiles slammed into alien troop carriers, while the chain gun raked down entire columns of alien soldiers. He yanked the helicopter upwards as an alien-launched missile lanced by them with bare meters to spare. Part of his mind noted that the aliens hadn’t keyed their missiles for proximity detonation, an odd oversight. Human missiles were capable of detonating close to their targets and taking them out with shrapnel.

An alien helicopter came into view, looking rather like a larger version of the Apache. It opened fire on the two British craft, launching a spread of missiles towards them. Danny retaliated by launching a Sidewinder — the only one they had — and deploying flares in the hope of decoying the alien missiles. The alien missiles were fooled long enough for him to take them low and fast away from the ambush sight, hopefully heading for a place where they could set down. They might not be able to rearm and resume the attack — if there were any more Hellfire missiles in Britain, they were probably misplaced — but they might escape with their lives…

He cursed as his threat receiver lit up. An alien missile crew had fired a missile from directly below them and it was climbing right up their tailpipe. There was no time to escape; the alien missile struck the Apache’s armour and blasted through into the compartment beyond. And the world went away in a blast of red-hot fire.