Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

The window shattered as a hail of bullets crashed through the tape.

“Get down,” Mr Adair shouted, as the wall was pocketed with bullet marks. Joshua didn’t have to be told twice. He was on the floor within seconds, watching in horror as the burst of fire tore the room to bits. He could hear one of the girls screaming, one of the other boys laughing in awe as the endless stream of bullets chewed into the wall. After what felt like hours, but was probably seconds, the bullets stopped… and a dull ominous silence fell.

He looked over at Mr Adair. “Are you all right?”

“Hell no,” Mr Adair said, his face very pale. The candles they’d been using to illuminate the apartment had to have been visible from outside… and someone had opened fire on them. It might have been the aliens, or it might have been a resistance group, or… there was really no way to tell, not at the moment. “Girls, stay low; when I tell you, start crawling down towards the basement.”

Sally looked fearful, but determined. “Dad, what about the coffee ?”

Joshua chuckled and broke it off, suddenly, when Mr Adair glared at him. “Your life is much more important than the coffee,” he reproved his daughter, making the point with a sharp slap to her rump. Joshua hid his smile at her outraged yelp. “Now, get crawling down there and stay low!”

The three of them left, slowly, leaving Joshua alone. His laptop was where he’d left it, but he didn’t dare power it up, not when the light might draw more fire. He crawled over to the candles, mounted on the table, and blew them out, one by one. Darkness fell in the room and, with it, he could see flickering light from outside. Greatly daring, surprising himself by his own courage, he crawled over to the window and peered, carefully, out over the city. Flames and smoke were everywhere and he could hear, in the distance, the sound of shots.

They’re revolting , he thought, with a sudden sense of awe. He wanted to get up and go join them down on the streets, but he didn’t quite dare that much, not when he didn’t know who’d been shooting at them. The streets below were almost empty, but he saw a gang of teenage boys, running towards the fighting and carrying bottles in their hands. He hoped, for their sake, that they were only alcohol, not Molotov Cocktails. The kids wouldn’t last more than a few seconds when the aliens saw them. The anarchy on the streets might be drawing them like a magnet, but they wouldn’t be able to hurt the aliens, now that they were warned…

A burst of fire, fired from somewhere out of his view, came down towards the kids and tore them apart. Joshua watched in horror as an pair of alien vehicles rushed past, one of them firing its heavy gun towards an unidentified target, the sound of the impact and detonation echoing through the air. He saw, briefly, a sniper crawling over a nearby rooftop… and realised that he didn’t dare go onto the roof. Soldiers had mistaken reporters for insurgents before… and the alien rules of engagement, it seemed, were much more liberal than any that American forces had used. He didn’t dare leave, though; he wanted — needed — to know what was going on. Below, the bodies sprawled, abandoned. If they were still alive, they would die there, on the streets.

He saw a beam of light, reaching down from high above like a pointing finger, striking somewhere to the north. The sound of the explosion reached him a second later and he realised he had seen a falling KEW; the aliens, in their anger or desperation, had reached for the heavy firepower. A series of secondary explosions echoed out over the city; he watched, grimly, as a new line of alien vehicles passed, heading northwards as well. The hovercraft drove over the bodies and, when they finished, there was very little left of what had once been human youths.

Bastards , he thought suddenly, as more aliens passed. They were heading towards the Texas State Centre, he realised suddenly, or at least they were heading in the same direction. Some of the great reporting heroes had been on the ground when American or British bases had been attacked by insurgents, surrounded, but never broken, and he wondered if that was what had happened to the aliens. They’d taken over the government buildings in the city and… hell, he’d have bet good money that attacking them would have been one of the population’s fondest dreams. How capable would the aliens be at defending a building they barely knew?

It was the arrival of the reinforcements from the camps outside the city, WarPriest Allon knew, that had turned the tide of the battle. The warriors charged with guarding the human buildings had fought well, but the best they could do was hold out against the attackers, knowing that they might run out of ammunition and be hacked down before they could escape. Nine tanks had been deployed to cover the human buildings — and every human they’d found in the area had been taken to the camps, just in case — but four of them were now burning and two more had been disabled. There had been too many warriors in the area to call in a KEW strike; the entire battle had been a close-run thing.

Dawn rose upon a burning and battered city. Hundreds of warriors patrolled the outskirts of the government zone, while thousands more patrolled the city itself, trying to locate the remaining human insurgents. Most of the remaining human population, Allon was relieved to see, was trying to keep itself out of the firing line. It might have helped keep incidental damage down during the fighting, but the odds were that some of them had been blazing away at his people last night, leaving a grand total of five hundred and seven warriors dead or seriously injured. Partnered with the losses all across the occupied zone, nearly a thousand warriors had been killed outright… and he didn’t want to think about how many humans had been killed. Their death toll, he thought, must number in the high thousands, at best.

And then there were the booby traps. The humans had proved themselves fiendishly cunning; there had been incidents where warriors, not recognising what was harmless and what wasn’t, had strayed into a killing ground and had been slaughtered. Cars had been rigged to explode, mines had been hidden in inventive locations… the chaos went on and on. It would take cycles upon cycles to restore the morale of his warriors; a day ago, they had felt themselves in charge of the city and of the humans. They had been confident of ultimate victory. Now…

Now, they felt as if they’d lost the war.

We’re not used to resistance on this scale , WarPriest Allon thought, coldly. They still held the advantage, but it didn’t feel like it. We never expected anything like it. There was nothing like this, not even during the worst of the Unification Wars. What sort of world have we found? What will we need to do to win?

“Welcome back to Washington,” the President said, as the handful of surviving Ambassadors were ushered into the small meeting room. The Secret Service had wanted them to come to the President’s bunker, but Paul had advised strongly against it, warning that the aliens might have left a surveillance device on their captives, or tampered with their minds in some way. That had started a new round of official paranoia, including the thought that all the Ambassadors might have been killed and replaced by look-alike aliens, but Paul had pointed out that that was probably a step too far. The aliens hadn’t shown anything like that kind of capability. “I’m sorry about the accommodation, but…”