Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

They’re insane , he thought, his ears echoing with the sound of their passage. They might be hundreds of kilometres above the Earth, but he could still hear them… and the thunderclaps of their KEWs impacting around the city. The Patriot missile batteries that had survived the first exchange of fire wouldn’t survive this one; as he watched, a flare of white light flashed up in the city, followed by a thunderous explosion. Windows were shattering all over the city. He didn’t want to think about the number of people who had been hurt in the invasion.

“We’ll eat them alive,” the gun nut said, with heavy satisfaction. He was toting a long rifle-like weapon that somehow managed to look completely terrifying. Joshua wouldn’t have bet against it being an illegal military-grade sniper rifle. “If they’re on the ground, they can be killed, right?”

Joshua shrugged. The closest he’d been to Iraq had been Florida, but he’d read enough about the insurgency against American forces to know that fighting the aliens was going to be bloody, very bloody. The aliens might have their own way of fighting insurgencies… or maybe they would force the Texans to turn Austin into a post-modern version of Stalingrad.

He smiled suddenly. If nothing else, he was going to get one hell of a story.

The enemy attempts to engage the landing craft hadn’t been entirely unsuccessful. A handful of the smaller, expendable craft had been hit with ABM warheads and destroyed, the stresses of their sudden course change tearing them apart. Two of the larger landing craft had rocked as warheads detonated under their heat shields, but the shields were strong enough to absorb the blow without significant damage. Retro-rockets fired madly to slow the descent, trying to ensure that the craft landed without emulating a KEW and causing massive damage — while incidentally keeping the crew and warriors alive.

An alien town seemed to spin up at them and they came down, hard. Shockwaves ran through the entire fleet of landing craft, but the warriors had braced themselves for the impact and were unhurt. Rapidly, knowing that they might be coming under fire at any moment, they ran for their escape hatches and vehicles, spilling out onto the new world they had come to conquer. One way or the other, there was no way back to the Guiding Star , not unless they secured a safe landing site for the spaceplanes. The landing craft could never return to space.

“Dear holy shit.”

Sergeant Oliver Pataki stared in disbelief as the small unit made its way towards the alien landing site. They’d been on a patrol of the area, just to check up on the thousands of refugees who’d fled the city and to locate possible deployment areas for Third Corps when the aliens had started to land. They’d had to seek shelter as the aliens had landed, the noise of their landing had been deafening, even at their distance, but now they were heading towards the alien positions. The higher-ups back at Fort Hood would need intelligence just to decide on a response.

Fort Hood was huge. The aliens had hit it, but they hadn’t actually done much damage… although they had killed several hundred men. If the remains of Third Corps could get into position to engage the enemy before they were deployed, the human race would win the first engagement with the aliens on the ground. Pataki knew, however, that that wasn’t going to be easy. Part of the platoon’s duties had been to check up on the damage to the roads and transportation network and they’d discovered that the aliens had blown the shit out of it. He didn’t fancy driving a few hundred Abrams tanks towards the aliens, not when the aliens would see them coming from orbit… and would probably drop a hammer on them. He’d listened to the briefings on possible enemy weapons with great care; some of them had been outrageously impossible, but others were all too practical. The crater back at Fort Hood provided all the proof of that that he could possibly want.

The massive column of towering flames reached into the sky. It seemed to be completely uncontrollable and he found himself wondering if the aliens had suffered a terrible disaster and had crashed into the ground. It wouldn’t have been that impossible — he was fairly sure that the aliens weren’t magicians, even if they could do things that humans couldn’t do — but somehow he doubted it. They wouldn’t have set out to invade a planet unless they were sure that they could actually land on it.

“Scott, stay behind,” he ordered, tersely. If they reached the top of that hill, they should have a good vantage point for staring down at the alien activities. Unless he missed his guess, the aliens had actually come down, intentionally or otherwise, on top of a small town. The population… he hoped they’d all fled, but if they’d been caught in the open. “If something happens to us, haul ass out of here.”

“Sergeant,” Scott said, tersely. Pataki could see the disappointment in his eyes, but someone had to remain to watch from a distance. “Good luck.”

Pataki led the quick march up the hill. It was only a handful of minutes before they reached the top — it wasn’t a very high hill — and they gazed cautiously down onto a scene from nightmares. The entire town seemed to be on fire, with human bodies scattered everywhere… and alien craft seemed to be distributing their troops. He pulled his binoculars to his eyes and stared down at the massive craft. They looked to be giant conical ships, each one the size of a major warship… and hundreds of aliens and their vehicles were spilling out of them. He watched, hypnotized, as the first marching group of aliens advanced out of the town.

They weren’t human. Standing still, wrapped in black body armour that concealed everything, it was easy to mistake them for humans, but as they moved, they bent and flexed in ways impossible for a human. They seemed almost to be made out of stiff jelly, each one moving almost like a shimmering mass, but yet… they marched perfectly in time. Pataki forced down the growing sense of unreality, remembering an encounter, long ago, with a humanoid android he’d seen at a science-fair, and forced himself to concentrate on the aliens. There seemed to be hundreds of them, maybe thousands, maybe more! They’d certainly gotten there the first with the most!

He wished, suddenly, that he had a nuke. A single nuke would have killed them all and put an end to their invasion of the planet. He watched as they set up machines around their landing site, some of them obviously designed to defend against aerial attacks, while others advanced out to secure an expanding perimeter. Large alien tanks — they had to be tanks — hummed up towards their position, riding on cushions of air. The hover tanks seemed unbothered by any kind of terrain.

Duty reasserted itself and he lifted his radio to his mouth. He could only hope that the alien jamming wouldn’t affect the signal. Fort Hood had to know what was going on and what the aliens were doing, whatever the risk. He composed a brief message and spoke, quickly, as the aliens headed around the hill and onwards to conquer the virgin land. He knew that they weren’t unstoppable, but from their position, they looked as if they had already won.

No , he thought, as he repeated his signal. They haven’t won yet .

The President had been working on some of the plans for reconstructing the country when Colonel Paul James burst in and disturbed him. It had astonished Paul how much and how little the President actually did; before he’d started to work with the President closely, he’d imagined the President as having his hand in almost everything. Instead, the President and his Cabinet set policy and left actually carrying out the policy to lower levels, something that had caused more than its fair share of problems in its time. The US had had several President who hadn’t been quite as black as they’d been painted, but had taken the blame for not micro-managing everything, despite the fact that that was impossible. The United States was the most complex nation on the Earth and micro-managing everything would have been impossible.