Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

The President held up a hand. “We can sort out those details later,” he said. At any other time, damage to even a single nuclear power plant, let alone blackouts over a large part of the country, would have been a major disaster. Now, it was just incidental damage, barely worth mentioning. “What happened in orbit? How badly did we hurt them?”

The display clicked back to the image of the ISS, seconds before the aliens opened fire. “The ISS was apparently hit at least once by an alien weapon and opened to vacuum,” Paul said. “NASA won’t commit itself on the possibility of prisoners being taken, but observers watching from the ground, through the most powerful telescopes we have, report that the smaller alien spacecraft recovered most of the ISS before it fell into the atmosphere. It could be that some of the crew survived and were captured, but we don’t know enough to be sure, one way or the other. There were definitely no survivors from the Discovery ; the shuttle was clearly blown into atoms. The final telemetry from the ship confirmed that it went down fighting.”

“They’re going to get medals,” the President said, firmly.

“We attacked the aliens quite heavily with the ground-based missiles and laser weapons, as well as laser-armed aircraft,” Paul continued. “Our losses in laser aircraft were total. The download of readings from the aircraft, before they were destroyed, suggest that the aliens targeted them with their own lasers, burning them out of the air. There were no survivors from any of the aircraft. Ground-based missile launchers managed to launch most of their missiles before they were destroyed, but… it’s hard to say just how effective they were.”

General Hastings coughed. “Give us a rough estimate,” he ordered. “What is the best and worst-case scenario?”

“We know we took out three of the parasite craft,” Paul said, after a moment. “The Russians attacked heavily with their ground-based missiles, both ABM and ICBM missiles, firing them straight up and detonating them in space. They claim to have killed five more of the alien ships, but the claims are impossible to verify. There are two more that we damaged, we believe, and a third that was subjected to a heavy pounding from the airborne lasers, but again, it’s hard to say for sure. We know they launched upwards of twenty-five parasite craft; at best, we took out ten between us, at worst, only three…”

“And they’ve killed millions of us,” Tom Spencer said. The Secretary of State looked almost broken by the night. Paul didn’t blame him; if he hadn’t had his duties, knowing what he did, he might have been broken as well. “What the hell do they want?”

“The Earth,” General Hastings said. He scowled over at Spencer. “You talked about the aliens having to be friendly, but now… now, look what they’re doing to us!”

“Enough,” the President said. There was an unaccustomed firmness in his tone. “Colonel, what do you believe the aliens will do next?”

“The analysts here and at other command complexes believe that the attack can only mean one thing,” Paul said. “They’re nothing, but the opening moves of a full-scale invasion of our planet.”

The President’s face paled. No President, outside impractical fiction, had had to live with the possibility of the United States being invaded. No one had the ability and motive to launch such an attack. The Soviet Union, at best, could have thrown away a few parachute divisions in a suicidal attack on the United States, but what would that have gained them? Mexico or Canada could have marched over the border, but one was friendly and the other was weak… and neither one could mount a significant military challenge. It would be the shortest war on record… and shorter still if anyone else had been insane enough to try. It was a geopolitical reality; barring an all-out nuclear war, the United States could not be attacked significantly on its home ground…

But the aliens could change all that.

“They’re coming here?” He asked. “Where do you think they will invade?”

Paul looked up at the display. It hadn’t been easy to collate all the data, but it all pointed to one thing; the aliens had global ambitions. A handful of smaller countries had been spared, mainly powerless countries like Somalia or Zimbabwe, but almost everywhere else had been struck. Saudi Arabia, Iran, Australia, India, Pakistan, Europe… hell, Europe was much more compressed than the States. The damage had to have been more than just significant . The aliens had gone after everything that could have been a threat to them and plenty more that could never have been more than a minor problem.

“It’s impossible to tell,” he said. He’d studied the reports, but so far, there was no sign of where the aliens intended to land. They’d bombarded the United States heavily, but they’d done the same to Europe, Russia and China… and they could go after any of them. He’d seen scenarios from a direct landing in Washington DC to a landing on the other side of the world. What would the aliens use to guide them in choosing their landing sites? “If I was commanding their forces, I’d go here, but…”

He broke off. “There’s no way to know, Mr President,” he admitted. “All we can really do is watch them through the observatories and see what they decide to do.”

“But they can’t seriously think that they can take on the entire world,” Deborah Ivey said. “There’s six billion humans on this world and plenty of them are soldiers, or armed to the teeth and…”

“They’re not all concentrated in one place,” General Hastings said. “They’ve sunk too many of our ships. If they landed in Europe, we couldn’t get a force over to help them without getting them sunk on their way, getting them all killed for nothing. It’s a pretty effective form of divide and conquer and if they take out all of the industrial areas of the planet, they can take over the rest later, assuming that invasion and settlement are their motive.”

“But they could just destroy us,” Spender protested. “Why would they even bother to keep us alive?”

“Perhaps they want slaves,” Paul said. It didn’t seem very likely; in his view, a civilisation that could cross the stars wouldn’t need slaves, but it might be a status thing. There were plenty of rich men and women in America — and indeed the entire world — that got a kick out of having servants; some of them probably wished that they were back in the days when slavery was legal. “Or maybe they want to integrate with us, but on their terms, or…”

“And if that’s the case, they must have a plan to deal with the current government,” the President said slowly. “They haven’t attempted to talk to us at all?”

Paul shook his head. It was the point he found most ominous. The attacks on the planet showed a frightening lack of concern for civilian causalities; he had the nasty feeling that Washington had been spared only because it wasn’t a military target, rather than any concern for the preservation of human life. Human rules of engagement might be very different to alien rules of engagement; for all he knew, any human with a weapon was a legitimate target. Humans had come up with a whole mixture of rules of war, some practical, some the work of dreamers… but the aliens might have a whole different attitude. They might regard genocide as a practical and moral solution to a problem, rather than a horrific crime to be avoided at all costs.

“No, Mr President,” he said. “If they can talk to us, they’re not interested in talking.”

“Maybe they’re talking to their prisoners,” Spencer said, hopefully. “Ambassador Prachthauser could tell them how to communicate with the government, couldn’t he?”