Christopher Nuttall - Invasion

“That’s far enough,” a voice drawled, seemingly out of nowhere. A red dot, barely visible, settled on his chest. “Hands in the air, if you please, and don’t touch any weapons.”

Brent mentally kicked himself as he raised his hands. A moment later, three soldiers materialised out of nowhere, their weapons raised and covering him. He was impressed with the ambush, although hindsight told him that they’d simply been watching for anyone trying to get into the area with night-vision gear… and he’d been fairly obvious during that final sprint. A pair of strong arms searched him roughly, removing the pistol, his rucksack and a knife.

“All right,” the soldier growled. Brent was suddenly aware of just what sort of sight he presented. He could have taken one of them in a fight, but all of them? They had every right to be more than a little paranoid of strangers. “Who the hell are you?”

“SF34,” Brent said. He didn’t have to give out anything else, not yet. “Who the hell are you?”

“They told us to expect you,” the soldier said. He sounded a great deal friendlier now, but Brent was still very aware of the red dot, now dancing around his heart. “Who was the instructor in unarmed combat during your time at Fork Polk?”

Brent almost panicked. There were several possible answers. “Sergeant Corso,” he said, finally. The gruff man looked completely harmless… and had thrown soldiers twice his size around as if they were children. “He reported to Captain Harmon, who in turn…”

“Ok, ok, we got you,” the soldier said. “Come on; we don’t have all day.”

Fort Hood’s interior felt… freer to Brent. It was certainly a far cry from Austin, where the insurgency had fought the aliens. Here, there were defensive positions everywhere, with tunnels and fallback positions carefully woven into the terrain, backed up by artillery and even a handful of tanks. The men — and a handful of women — looked as if they would never pass another inspection, but they were united by their determination to hold out indefinitely. They were proud of what they’d done, he saw, and he couldn’t blame them. The best the insurgency had done was bleed the aliens badly.

His guide told him some of the stories as they reached a hidden door, leading down to a bunker complex. Fort Hood had been on alert since the aliens had separated their ship and most of the buildings had been abandoned… and the aliens had barely dented their capabilities, even if — his guide assured him — there had been a lot of very convincing weeping and gnashing of teeth on open channels. They’d come in expecting an easy occupation, ambushed and chased back out again, after which the fighting had settled down to the occasional savage confrontation between the two sides and plenty of insurgency. The bunker system, something that wasn’t discussed publicly, had kept Fort Hood alive… and kicking.

“So that’s what they’re doing,” Colonel Osborn said, when Brent had finally finished his story. He’d regained a little of his own pride when he’d realised that the soldiers were in awe of his own accomplishments, even though neither side had really harmed the aliens enough to make them give up and withdraw. “They’re settling here.”

He scowled. Brent had been a little surprised to discover that a mere colonel was commanding the defence, but it had turned out that the original commanding officer had been killed by the aliens, although so far it seemed that they didn’t know that.

“We’ll forward this off to Washington,” he added. “You might have to go with it later. Until then, get some rest. You’ve earned it.”

“It’s confirmed, then?”

Paul nodded. The sight of the massive engineering bay, covered with engineers moving, welding and slowly building the spacecraft, awed him. He’d been a frustrated spaceman long before he’d passed his tenth birthday, learning far too quickly that very few people flew the fantastic space shuttles… and that they never went anywhere, and part of him envied Gary Jordan, now a General, beyond words.

“Yes,” he said, grimly. “They’re landing in Australia.”

Gary nodded slowly. “And it’s still going to be a week before we’re completely ready to move,” he said. “At least that should keep them busy somewhere on the other side of the world.”

Paul scowled. The aliens had fallen on Australia one morning and, according to the handful of reports, were securing their landing zones now in the centre of the country. The Australian Army had put up a fight, but the aliens had stamped on them from orbit with the same power they’d brought to bear on America and the Middle East, forcing the remainder of the army to go underground and carry on an insurgency. Australia was hardly as disarmed as Europe, but with far fewer people and far fewer sources of supplies, he didn’t know how long an insurgency could last. They would have made the same kind of preparations as other armies had been making, even since the lessons from Texas had started to sink in, but would they be effective? No one knew for sure.

He cast his gaze around the dissembled spacecraft. “A week?” He asked. It seemed implausible somehow. “Are you sure?”

“Oh, yes,” Gary said. “Really, the guy who invented these things was a genius who didn’t have to work for a bunch of idiots who knew nothing about risk and cared only for pork barrel funding. A few hundred parts, each one easy to make with the right equipment… and all we have to do is put them together like a jigsaw to build a flying spacecraft. It’s far more impressive than I can say; if part of one spacecraft went down, we could cannibalise parts from another to keep it flying, without much in the way of compatibility issues.”

He led the way over to a set of strange-looking modules. “The shuttle that crashed in our territory was a cargo and passenger ship,” he explained. “They were actually capable of carrying quite a bit of cargo and we’ve replaced all of that with weapons. It’s going to make landing a bit more dangerous than it would be for them, but with the parachutes in the nosecone, we should be able to get back down safely. Of course, if we don’t actually win, our chances of survival will be about the same as a meat-eater at the annual tofu-munch convention, but…”

Paul grinned. “How many volunteers did you have?”

“Thousands,” Gary said. “Pretty much every surviving USAF pilot wanted in, along with the remaining astronauts, navy and Marine flyers. We put them all through the training period — it’s lucky we have your lady friend; simulating flight was actually quite difficult without her help — and put the best ones to work, simulating attack vectors. So much needs to be done carefully — we can’t really plan this too much — but if luck is with us, we should be able to hurt them.”

Paul nodded. “And the remainder of the gear?”

“I’ll show you,” Gary said, leading him out of the underground hanger and into another large room. A pile of newly recovered alien equipment lay on the table, being sorted out by a group of young engineers, while a second table had several alien suits lying on them. Gary nodded towards the pile of equipment. “Looks crude, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” Paul said. “Why…?”

“You’ve never been in combat, have you?” Gary asked. Paul said nothing. It was shameful, at least to him, to admit it, but he’d spent his whole life in the military and had never been shot at or fired a bullet in anger. “Trust me; the Pentagon buys a lot of crap that promises the heavens and the earths, but is hell on the battlefield users. The guys in procurement tell the designers to fuck off and they bitch loudly to their congressman, who takes a large bribe and orders the army or the fighter jocks or whoever to accept it. Oh, they’re not always that bad, but… most of them tend to have flaws that need to be edited out, somehow.”