Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

One by one, they pressed their hands to the scanners and confirmed the targeting data. The Inquisitors, apart from watching their own people, served as the intelligence staff for the High Priest, if only to prevent warriors and researchers from being contaminated by direct access to alien data. They had researched the human religions thoroughly and had located their centres of power, preparing targeting data for the High Priest and the War Leader. The idea of physically occupying their centres of power was an attractive one, something they knew would guarantee them victory, but that wouldn’t always be possible. The Takaina couldn’t afford to occupy every human city, not yet, but they didn’t have to. They could take other steps instead.

Inquisitor Nine spoke from his seat. “Target is locked and device is armed,” he said. There was, as was right and proper, no excitement or anticipation in his voice. As far as they were concerned, what they were about to do was just a job. “We can fire on your command.”

Europe was passing rapidly underneath them. It still escaped the researchers how the humans hadn’t united into a handful of large states, but at the moment, it served in their favour, particularly when it came to religion. The Truth tended to ignore, or place to one side, religions that weren’t directly competitive, but the human religions were all going to be competitive. The Inquisitors, insofar as they felt anything, would have loved to get to grips with the religions on the ground, but that wasn’t going to be completely possible. They would have to take other steps.

“Fire,” Inquisitor Five ordered.

The ship jerked slightly as it launched the single device from its underbelly. Small rockets fired at once, nudging the device into a trajectory that would, inevitably, bring it down to Earth, hard. It wouldn’t matter; once the device had reached the required distance from the ground, it would detonate and purge one of the human religions from the face of the Earth. Without its centre of power, it would fall apart and the Truth would be there for the humans. It had worked on dozens of worlds, ever since the Unification Wars… and it would work here. The Inquisitors were literally unable to even question that doctrine.

“Weapon away,” Inquisitor Nine confirmed. “Trajectory is precise.”

“Good,” Inquisitor Five said. He would have liked to have visited nuclear fire across the remaining human holy sites, but that wasn’t part of his orders. “Take us back into orbit and prepare to return to the Guiding Star .”

Below them, the device continued its fall towards the planet.

The small observatory had been taken over by the Italian military a week before the aliens had arrived, despite the protests of its staff and students, and rapidly converted into an alien-monitoring centre. Italy, being the part of Europe that might come under attack from Iran — a trend, so far, that had remained happily fictional — had taken a progressive attitude towards defence, constructing a network of radars, tied into NATO, that monitored Italian airspace constantly. The aliens had shut down the radars with their KEW weapons, but the observatories remained, passively watching the aliens from the ground.

Colonel Alberto Felici had been on duty when the telephone call had come through from Britain. A British observatory had tracked an alien craft as it lowered itself down towards the planet, coming in on what was suspected to be an attack run, even though the aliens normally launched their weapons from standard orbits. There was certainly something odd about it… and, with the aliens invading the Middle East, everyone was nervously awaiting the next step in the alien plan. He studied the computer screen, which showed the alien craft as it entered their view, and frowned. It almost looked as if the craft was going to pass directly over Rome…

“I have a track,” Julia announced, from her console. Programming the computers to work with the telescope data had been easy… once they’d realised that astronomers had been doing it for years. “The UFO is definitely going to pass over Rome, almost exactly over our position.”

“How lucky for us,” Felici muttered. The alien trajectory was taking it over France, but at the speed it was moving, it would be bare minutes before it crossed over Italy. He longed for some kind of weapon, something that could be used to shoot back at them, but the aliens could just pick off whatever part of Italy they wanted. The Italian Air Force had been literally shot out of the sky and several army bases had been destroyed from orbit. He wasn’t even sure why… unless the aliens hoped that there would be an uprising and the Italian state would be destroyed. “Keep an eye on it and pass it on to the next observatories in line.”

He ran his hand through his hair. Italy had been badly hit by the aliens and he was worried about his family. He got to watch the aliens as they carried out the invasion, but he was unable to intervene… and, as far as he knew, no one else could either. The aliens had been attacked in orbit during the first encounter, but since then they’d kept space to themselves and prevented the human race from striking back at them. The Prime Minister might keep up the encouraging tone in his webcasts, but Felici and his fellow officers knew the truth; Europe was naked and defenceless under alien fire. Once the aliens had finished attacking the Middle East, and completed the destruction of America, it would probably be their turn next… and all they could do was wait to be hit.

“Sir,” Julia snapped, her voice suddenly rising with alarm. “The alien launched something towards us!”

Felici whirled towards her console. She was right; the alien spacecraft, now firing it’s boosters to reach a higher orbit, had left something behind. The telescope was powerful, but all they could tell was that it didn’t appear to be a KEW. The KEWs they’d seen while Italy had been attacked had been smaller, somehow, and faster. This… object was just falling down slowly towards Italy.

His blood ran cold, suddenly. “Get me a trajectory on it,” he said, knowing that it was already too late. The Americans had said that the aliens were religious invaders… and Rome was the home of the Vatican, the largest religious centre in the world. Felici, himself a devout Catholic, had wondered what the aliens would do when they reached Rome, but now he had the suspicion that he knew. The alien weapon was still falling…

“Sound the alert,” he ordered. It was already too late. “Everyone get down…”

The windows went white as the bomb detonated.

High over Rome, precisely targeted on the Vatican, the nuclear bomb detonated. For an instant, too quickly for human minds to follow, the bomb was still there… and then it exploded, sending a massive blast of flame over the city. Seconds later, the shockwave followed, blasting Rome and smashing buildings, merely human in the face of the raging power of nuclear fission. The people caught under the blast were vaporised, utterly, while those further away, but unlucky enough to be looking at the blast, were blinded. The secondary effects of the blast, the shockwave and the firestorm, tore through the city, disrupting or destroying the city’s emergency response teams. Armed police and soldiers had been patrolling Rome, as in many other European cities, and the blast hit them, killing and maiming thousands. The EMP pulse knocked out or disrupted every piece of electronic equipment within range, apart from shielded devices, and further disrupted recovery efforts. No city in Europe had been hit like that, not since the Second World War, and Italy was ill-prepared for the crisis… but really, who could have prepared? The disaster was so large as to be unimaginable.