Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

“One theory of alien life is that alien worlds will seek similar answers to similar problems,” Paul injected. “The humanoid form is incredibly versatile, far more versatile than… say, a fish or a horse, and alien intelligent life might have developed along the same lines. No one has actually gotten proof, one way or the other, until now. They may be alien, but they have to have at least an equal grasp of science and technology to us, if not a superior one. They may not be as alien as we imagined.”

“That’s not, of course, a good thing,” General Hastings said. “That means that we’ll want the same worlds and so on.” He paused. “The aliens landed in extremely heavy force — one figure puts their landing force at over five hundred thousand soldiers — and expanded rapidly. NASA says that they might actually be stuck on the planet…”

The President was interested. “Stuck?”

General Hastings nodded at Paul. “The issue with getting anything into orbit is mass, basically,” Paul explained. “To get a shuttle into orbit requires two external boosters and an external tank, all of which are discarded once the shuttle is on its way. To get the Apollo moon missions into space required a massive rocket, which actually discarded several stages as it rose upwards into space. The more mass, including fuel, the more power you need to push it into orbit, which means that the requirements keep going upwards.”

He realised that the President was starting to look a little confused and swiftly came to the point. “The aliens haven’t shown anything that is completely beyond our understanding yet,” he continued. “A fusion rocket — if that is what they have — is beyond our current accomplishments, but we can understand it. They are definitely bound by the same laws of physics as we are. Their massive landing craft can get down, all right, but they can’t reach orbit again. They’re stuck on the surface of Earth.”

The President laughed suddenly. “Are you sure of that?”

“It’s impossible to be certain, and a lot depends on the assumptions fed into the computers, but unless they have some means of reducing mass or even full-blown antigravity, they’re stuck. They have to win or they can’t get back into orbit.”

“In other words,” General Hastings said shortly, “we can kill them all.” He looked over at the map. “At the latest reports, all of the cities and towns within the occupied areas had been occupied by the aliens. Resistance was light in some places and extremely heavy in others. There are literally millions of refugees roaming the countryside and many of them are trying to get out of the alien-controlled territory. Our remaining units within the red zone have been forced back to their feet and are either trying to make it out or prepare an insurgency.”

The President frowned. “I was under the impression that an insurgency was doomed unless it had outside support,” he said. “General, we need to liberate that area as soon as possible.”

“Yes, Mr President,” General Hastings said. “The problem is that it might not be possible to liberate them at once.”

He looked back at the map. “The aliens have deployed ground-based antiaircraft systems that are capable of blasting anything we have out of the sky, so far,” he said. “They have deployed a mixture of ground-based and space-based radar arrays that allow them to literally track everything moving on the ground. Tanks, armoured vehicles and other targets, such as trains, have been blasted from orbit. I doubt that we have a single tank remaining intact within the red zone. Their laser weapons are capable of burning missiles and artillery out of the air… and, of course, anywhere that opens fire is targeted at once from orbit. In short, Mr President, their position is impregnable for the moment.”

Paul spoke before the President could say a word. “But that still leaves us with the insurgency option,” he added. “We can certainly supply insurgents and send Special Forces over into the red zone…”

“The Army has to liberate the area,” the President said. “Can’t you launch a major attack?”

General Hastings hesitated. “It will take at least a week to sort out everyone who escaped from the red zone and get them into new units,” he said, grimly. “We have major forces massing outside the red zone, but at the moment, they are totally vulnerable to KEW strikes from orbit. If we launch a major armoured thrust, we will have the shit blown out of us and merely add a few thousand more dead to the lists. Given three weeks, we could mass over seven hundred thousand men and a thousand vehicles… but that might be exactly what they want us to do.”

“All the money we spent on the Army and it cannot defend us?” The President asked. “Is there nothing we can do?”

“The Army was not built up to fight in these conditions,” General Hastings said, tartly. Paul heard the underlying anger in his voice and shivered. “We were used to fighting as part of an armoured force with air cover, or as a counter-insurgency force, but not as an insurgency force in our own right. We lost control of space, Mr President, and as long as they can look down on us from their lofty perch, we’re going to lose.”

Paul spoke quickly. “We may be able to negate some of their advantages,” he suggested. “We’re building up new missiles and ground-based lasers as quickly as we can. If we use our remaining missiles, we could force the ships orbiting high overhead to concentrate on defending themselves, rather than attacking the planet.”

“Work out a plan,” the President ordered. “Find us a way to hurt them.”

“Nukes,” Deborah said suddenly. “Can’t we get a nuke in there and use it against one of their ships?”

“You can’t be serious,” Spencer burst out. “You’re talking about nuking American soil!”

“At the moment,” Deborah snapped, “it is not American soil.”

“And so you’re going to destroy it in order to save it?” Spencer snapped back. “I don’t think that the people will thank us for scorching their cities with nuclear fire.”

“Have you been listening?” Deborah asked, icily. “We are not in a position where we can just wash our hands of the entire affair. We cannot decide that the going is too tough and so we’d better get going, not here. This isn’t Iraq, or Somalia, or somewhere where the cowards in government can decide to back away, having made the entire situation a great deal worse, and leave the locals to death, enslavement or worse. This is American soil!”

“It won’t be American soil if we leave it a radioactive mess…”

“Enough,” the President said, sharply. “Colonel James, what do you think of the proposal to deploy nukes against the enemy?”

Paul flinched, suddenly very aware of his junior status. Special Advisor to the President or no, the President could quite easily blame him for anything that was politically… uncomfortable. As an American, he disliked the thought of using nukes on any American soil, particularly a number of cities… all of which had thousands of Americans serving as human shields.

He said as much. “Any deployment of nukes will have to be done carefully to avoid major civilian casualties,” he said. “The second problem is that deploying the nukes isn’t going to be easy.”

The President blinked. “Was all the money we spent on missiles wasted as well?”

“No, Mr President,” Paul said. “We developed a limited ABM capability and, we know, so did the Russians and Chinese, but we never developed the kind of working screen that the aliens have deployed. Nukes are normally deployed via aircraft, missiles or shells… and the aliens have a working screen against all three. We could bombard them repeatedly in the hopes of getting a warhead through their defences, but we would rapidly run out of warheads. The stockpiles were, I’m afraid to admit, badly run down in the years since the cold war ended.”