Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

The laser beam struck the underside of the Warthog and started to burn through the armour. Felicia had only a second to realise that there was a problem and by then, it was too late. The laser burned through the aircraft and send the remains crashing to Earth, smashing down into the ground. Behind her, the aliens recovered and continued onwards towards Austin.

“It’s confirmed, sir,” the aide said. There was a grim helpless note in his voice. The United States was not used to defeat. “We got distress sequels from all of the Warthogs.”

General Ridgley winced. Normally, he would be commanding from a bunker, rather than a heavily camouflaged command vehicle. He’d had to send the Warthogs into the fray, in hopes of delaying the aliens and obtaining intelligence on their deployments, but they’d all been burned out of the air. The UAVs and even the handful of supersonic fighters he’d risked had suffered the same fate; the aliens, it seemed, were really determined to keep the human race out of the air.

“Send a runner down to the camp,” he ordered shortly. He’d grown up in a world where intelligence would arrive almost at once, where he could command his forces from half a world away… but that world was gone. If they sent a single radio signal, the aliens would smash them from orbit, probably without ever knowing what they had done. They were dependent, now, on runners, either on foot or using motorbikes. Without them, he would be completely cut off from the rest of his force. The field telephones weren’t working very well. “Tell them that we’ll meet them outside Austin.”

The map looked barely changed. The fragmentary reports weren’t enough to build up a real picture of what was happening. Fort Hood had been hit hard enough to destroy its communications systems and he no longer had much in the way of communication with the other forces scattered around the area. The aliens were likely to defeat them all individually, one by one, and prevent them from concentrating against was through orbital bombardment. The only clue they had as to the alien locations were through the work of a signals and intelligence unit, which was tracking the sources of alien transmissions, even if they couldn’t read them. It wasn’t enough. He didn’t know what was going on… and that meant that command had devolved down the ranks.

He hoped that they’d be up to the task.

The torrent of aliens seemed never-ending. Sergeant Oliver Pataki had given up trying to estimate how many aliens there actually were in their conical spacecraft; he’d counted over two thousand so far, and at least a hundred vehicles. Their hovering tanks and smaller vehicles, which he suspected were their form of IFV, seemed to move faster than comparable human vehicles… and that would give them an advantage. The countryside seemed to be burning everywhere; he could see plumes of smoke rising up in all directions. It didn’t look good for the human race.

He was mildly surprised that the aliens hadn’t detected their signals by now, but it was possible that they were simply ignoring them… or maybe, given how close they were to the alien landing site, they were reluctant to risk bombing them from orbit. The aliens hadn’t attempted to come up the hill yet, but once they did, the four soldiers intended to give them a hot welcome. He checked his M16 for the umpteenth time as yet another alien force advanced into the distance, heading towards the fires. Now that the alien craft had landed, he could hear the sounds of shooting in the distance, human weapons… and a deep booming sound that seemed somehow unearthly.

At least they don’t have handheld lasers , he thought, with a sudden burst of amusement. The alien weapons, as far as they could tell from their vantage point, were projectile weapons, although they looked nastier than some human weapons. He might have been imagining it — it was hard to tell at their distance — but there seemed to be a certain crudeness to their design, although that didn’t mean that they were useless. The AK-47 was an example of a crude approach… and no one would have called it a bad weapon, or even a useless piece of junk, not like some of the ideas that the scientists sold to the Pentagon that didn’t work in the field. The aliens seemed to prize the simple approach to technology; he’d seen nothing, so far, that he couldn’t understand, although human hovercraft technology was inferior to alien tech. He wished that he had some antitank mines he could test against the alien vehicles; he had a nasty feeling that some of the more basic mines wouldn’t be triggered by the alien hovercraft.

“Sir,” one of his men said. Pataki followed his finger and saw an alien aircraft take to the air. It looked like a drone to him, something comparable to the Predator recon drone, but as it flew, he saw that it carried bombs under its wings as well. Predators had been armed for years, but he hadn’t viewed them as a serious threat against a well-planned air defence system… but the aliens had shattered the American defences.

“I see it,” he said. There was nothing for it. They’d have to make another radio transmission. The system recorded the message and then transmitted it in one compressed burst, but he suspected that the aliens could detect microburst transmissions. They’d certainly proven themselves adapt at tracking other radio transmissions. “Recording…”

Having decided to take the risk, it was easy enough to make a complete report of everything they’d seen, including their count of alien tanks and other vehicles, as well as the aliens expanding their control over the landing site. They’d taken over a field and started to string up some kind of wire around it, something that reminded him of a holding pen for prisoners, although he doubted that they intended to capture the entire population of Texas. It was a good sign, in a way; it proved that they were taking prisoners. He completed the report and transmitted it… and then saw the aliens altering course. A group of them, marching on their strange legs, were heading up the hill.

“I saw them,” he said. They’d taken up as good a defensive position as possible, but he was certain that the aliens wouldn’t allow them to escape, not when they could surround the hill and intercept any attempt at fight. That left fighting or surrendering and he didn’t want to surrender, not when the aliens might have killed them all on sight. “Take aim…”

He levelled his M16 at an alien head, hidden behind a black helm, and his trigger finger tightened on the trigger. “Fire,” he snapped. Four shots rang out as one; four aliens tumbled to the ground. Their heads seemed to explode as the bullets passed through them, a sight that caused him to blink with disbelief; outside the movies, it wasn’t that easy to literally shatter a person’s skull with a bullet. “Hit them again…”

An answering burst of fire flashed back at them. The sounds of the alien weapons were definitely different, but they seemed to work on similar principles; Pataki pulled a grenade off his belt, unhooked it and tossed it down towards the aliens. The explosion seemed to shake the ground; in its wake, he heard inhuman sounds of pain. They sounded like a trio of sea lions, or seals, howling their pain and outrage… and then an enemy grenade came over into their position. Pataki threw himself away from the weapon, watching in horror as one of his men tried to cover it with his body and was blown to bits when the grenade exploded. A second grenade, much closer, stunned him long enough for the aliens to break into their position; dazed, he realised in a moment of clarity that he’d lost his weapon. They peered down at him, their faces hidden behind their dark masks, and then pulled him to his feet. His body ached dreadfully, but they didn’t seem to notice, or care.