by Hatchett
Anyone or anything touching the forcefield wall would initially receive a painful electric shock, which would grow in strength the longer you stayed in contact, until ultimately you were vaporised.
However, some of the houses and other buildings dissected by the forcefield walls were higher than nine metres and, therefore, some people were able to cross the forcefield wall via an upper floor of a building.
Once the outer ring of the forcefield walls were up and running, Kinaejah gave the order to link all the Pylons, so two new forcefield walls running diagonally across the square were immediately created, one from Wembley to Peckham and another from Hackney to Fulham. This left four equal sized triangular sections within the square; North, South, East and West. However, the part Kinaejah liked best was the fact the two internal forcefield walls intersected at Buckingham Palace, ruining the building and separating the grounds into the four separate sections.
Kinaejah gave the order for the drones and Battlecruisers to focus on the sealed off areas, destroying all buildings and killing all people, ready to flatten the area so that he could build his own structures.
People in the sixteen square kilometre area didn’t have many options and they had to move quickly if they wanted to survive. Those who realised that tall buildings next to the forcefield walls might provide an escape route headed for them in their thousands, many being zapped by the drones and Battlecruisers as they ran for their lives.
Thousands of others headed for the tube stations and the perceived safety of being underground and out of sight. Although many managed to reach the platforms and start making their way along the tracks away from the city in the dark, thousands were still trapped and killed as thousands of orbs were dispatched to hunt them down.
It was a massacre, with millions dying within a few hours. The only people safe for the time being happened to be those in Government who were in their own sealed secret bunkers below Westminster. The hundreds of politicians, civil servants, high ranking police officers and key people from MI5 and MI6 watched monitors in shock as the annihilation took place. Famous landmarks like Tower Bridge, the Houses of Parliament, St Paul’s Cathedral, the Tower of London, the Shard and all buildings in the city like The Gherkin, the Nat West Tower and The Cheesegrater were all levelled, killing anyone who happened to be inside.
While Kinaejah watched the wholesale destruction and killing with a smile on his face, the PM quickly used the Laakuu communicator to update the Harrys’ on what was happening and hoped that they would be able to spread the news.
40
“THEY’VE GONE,” Jess confirmed.
Everyone in the lounge area turned to look at her, wondering what she was talking about.
“What have, Jess?” Harriet asked quietly.
“THE SPACECRAFT.”
“What, those drones?” Harry interjected.
“ALL OF THEM ARE SPEEDING EAST.”
“Anything around here at all?
“NO.”
Harry turned to Jason and Andy.
“Go take a look upstairs. This may be our chance to set a few things up.”
As Jason, Andy, Steve, Adil and George started towards the lift, Kate and Hannah came running out of the communications room carrying the Laakuu communicator.
Harry was momentarily confused until he saw the lights on the device were on.
Hannah placed the device on a small table and moved her hands over the panels. Everyone grouped around as the funnel of light formed into a bright cone, which expanded until it was almost touching the ceiling. Slowly, the dust motes swirling around inside the cone of light solidified into the image of a shaken PM.
“Hello Sam,” Harry started. “Is everything OK?”
“Hi Harry,” Sam replied. “I might not have much time so please listen and spread the word. The Laakuu have built some sort of wall around the city and are destroying all buildings and killing all the people inside it. There are spacecraft of all shapes and sizes wherever you look, and they’re not taking any prisoners.”
“OK,” Harry replied slowly. “I’m not sure we can help…”
“I’m not expecting you to,” Sam interrupted. “Just spread the word. In the meantime, I’m going to try and contact Mason and talk him into seeing sense.”
“I wouldn’t!” Joshua advised, coming forwards. “He won’t listen and all you’ll do is give him another target.”
“But I’ve got to do something,” Sam argued.
“There is nothing you can do but wait it out and be ready to act if we get a chance.”
“But millions are dying,” Sam protested.
“You can’t save them,” Joshua stated. “Lie low and wait.”
The PM looked dubious but eventually nodded, a tear of frustration and sorrow running down her cheek.
“OK. I’ll wait. Spread the message.”
“We will do,” Harry confirmed, and the cone of light dwindled away before the panel on the communicator closed and all lights went off.
Harry turned to Hannah and Kate.
“Could you please spread the message over the radio?”
Hannah nodded and moved to go back to the communications room.
“Wait!” Joshua ordered, and Hannah turned back to look at him. “Tell people that they should avoid the walls. They are forcefields and will give you a nasty shock if you touch them or kill you if you stay in contact. They cannot be breached without a fragmentation device, which only the Stormtroopers will have. I would expect them to be ten meters tall, but some of that will be below ground.”
Hannah nodded and she and Kate headed for the communications room.
“Thank you, Joshua,” Harry said.
Joshua turned to Jess.
“Are you sure all the craft have gone?”
Jess nodded.
“Then there’s a few things we can do.”
“Like what?” Harry asked.
“Remember those boxes I told you to take from Mason’s house? The ones we didn’t get time to look at?”
“Robert’s house,” Harry corrected.
“Whatever,” Joshua snapped, clearly losing patience. “Do you have them or not?”
“Yes, we have them…somewhere,” Harry replied.
“Then find them! Quickly! It could be the difference between us living and dying.”
“What are they?” Harry asked.
“We don’t have time, just find them.”
Harry looked around. He really needed Jason or Andy here because they’d brought all the stuff down.
“Well?” Joshua asked, clearly irritated, “What are you waiting for?”
“I don’t know where they are. Jason and Andy brought everything down and stored it away.”
“Fuck!” Joshua shouted, slapping his hand against his forehead.
“WAIT,” Jess said and closed her eyes and tilted her head back as if she was imagining the ground above her head.
She located Jason outside the house and directed the question to him. She felt his confusion, wondering what was going on, but he didn’t need to reply because as soon as she had asked the question, she picked up the picture Jason had automatically conjured up in his mind.
Jess opened her eyes and lowered her head. She turned to her right and stared at a row of shelves and boxes against the wall ten meters away.
“THAT STACK,” she said, raising her hand to point.
Joshua ran towards the stack and started moving boxes out of the way. Within a few seconds he found what he was looking for, buried beneath another couple of boxes. He picked up one of the cases and ran back to the table and opened it.
Inside the case were ten metallic objects which looked remarkably like cheap garden solar lights which could be bought at any ironmonger or garden center.
Joshua quickly picked up the objects one at a time and handed them around.
“Take these,” he started, “and go and stake them in the ground all around the property.”
“What for?”
Harry asked.
“Camouflage.”
“How far away?”
“As far as you like, but it’s better if they’re roughly the same distance from each other and must form a complete loop. Put this end,” he indicated the sharper end, “into the ground, then tap this panel,” he indicated the top of the device. “It will glow blue when it’s turned on.”
“OK, but…” Harry started.
“Just do it,” Joshua barked. “Questions later.”
With that, he handed a couple to Harry and Damian, one to Harriet, Di, John and Paula and kept a couple for himself. He then headed for the lift, the others trailing behind him, wondering what was going on.
As they were going up in the lift, Harry gave each of them a direction to go in. He suggested that everyone should go as far as tree line on one side of house and the hedges on the other side. It would give them a circular perimeter roughly two hundred meters from the house.
The lift doors opened, and they all made their way quickly along the corridor and out of the house then split up, going in the directions Harry had given them.
They passed the others who were already outside, receiving bemused expressions as they walked off in different directions away from the house.
It didn’t take long to jog a couple of hundred meters, although John was a little out of breath when he reached a fence separating the house grounds from the surrounding fields. Panting, he dropped to his knees and drove the spiky end of the device into the ground. He then tapped the top and was pleased to see it glow with a soft bluish light. He wondered what the hell was going on as he started making his way back towards the house.
He had only gone about ten meters when a sort of translucent blue blanket began to spread from behind him and up over his head, unfurling towards the other markers around the perimeter and the house. He watched in fascination as he saw other blankets appear at intervals all around the perimeter and was mesmerized when all ten ‘blankets’ seemed to merge to form a massive dome over the house and surrounding area. He felt like he was standing under the tent-like Millennium Dome in London, yet he could still see everything the other side of the curtain, albeit tinted a hazy blue.
He looked back to the device he had planted and saw that the bottom edge of the dome spread along the ground to the next device in both directions. He spotted Paula not too far away, looking in awe at the spectacle, just as he had done, and he headed in her direction.
“What do you make of this?” John asked as he approached.
“Unbelievable,” Paula replied. “It’s beautiful.”
“It is,” John agreed. “We better get back and find out exactly what we have just done.”
Everyone was beginning to gather on the patio outside the kitchen bi-fold doors, including those who had been downstairs but had now come up to witness what was going on. They were all staring at the dome, except Joshua, who looked as disinterested as it was possible to be.
“Shouldn’t we be getting back to the basement?” John asked as he and Paula approached the patio.
“No need,” Joshua replied. “We are safe now.”
John smiled. The thought of being safe was thoroughly welcome, but it still didn’t answer the questions running through his head.
“How are we safe?” he started.
Joshua looked at him, as the others dragged their eyes away from the spectacle to hear Joshua’s answer.
“You don’t need to know how,” Joshua replied. “All you need to know is that this dome will block anything from seeing or hearing us, but we can still see and hear things outside it. It’s like a…mirage. Anyone looking at it from the outside will just see an empty field.
“Does that mean we’re trapped inside as well?” John asked.
“No. It’s not like the forcefield walls. You can walk through these walls, but as soon as you leave the dome, you will be visible to anyone out there. If you go through the wall and look back towards the house, you’ll just see a field.”
“Can we still send communications?” Harry asked.
“Yes,” Joshua confirmed. “In fact, it’s better because it will cloak where the transmissions are coming from. None of the spacecraft will be able to see, hear or track us down.”
“Can my helicopter go through the dome?
“Yes, but it will be seen and heard as soon as it leaves.”
“WHAT HAPPENS IF A SPACECRAFT FLIES INTO THE DOME?” Jess asked.
“Then we need to be able to take it out very, very quickly, before it has the chance to figure out what has happened and attack or communicate with the Mothership and give our position away.”
“ARE WE ABLE TO TAKE ONE OUT?”
“Yes, but we need to unpack some more boxes and find the necessary weapons.”
Harry asked Kate and Hannah to get back to their communications while Jason, Andy, Steve, Adil and Joshua went back down into the basement to find the weapons and arrange some additional defenses.
In the meantime, Hilda now had access to her proper kitchen and was already brewing some drinks and making some food as everyone went about their business.
41
In Mitcham, Pete, Sam and Jimmy listened intently to Kate and Hannah’s broadcast.
“Christ!” Jimmy exclaimed. “The bastards are flattening London.”
“And probably every other major city around the World,” Pete suggested.
“So, what are we supposed to do?” Jimmy asked, a slight whine to his usual high-pitched voice.
Sam considered the question. Mitcham was roughly five kilometres South of this wall, so they were safe for the time being.
“I think we have two choices; one, while the aliens are tied up, try and get to Wiltshire before the spaceships come back or, two, we use the break to gather more supplies, warn people in the area and hunker back down here until we know what we’re doing.”
“No way we can get to Wiltshire,” Pete said.
“But I don’t want to stay down here forever,” Jimmy whinged.
“I think we have to stay,” Sam decided for them. “Let’s get outside and see what’s going on.”
Pete nodded in agreement and Jimmy reluctantly agreed with a frown on his face.
With that, they all headed towards the door, Sam leading the way.
42
Kinaejah watched as the drones and Battlecruisers reduced the City of London to rubble and any stray inhabitant vaporised. Watching some of the famous old landmarks disintegrate before his eyes brought a smile to his features. This was real ‘shock and awe!’
Every now and again, he switched his screens to view other places around the World. The Kremlin was now nothing but dust, as was the White House, and both Moscow and Washington were surrounded by forcefield walls, with drones and Battlecruisers buzzing around destroying anything in sight.
He particularly enjoyed watching the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Opera House get destroyed. The Great Wall of China was no longer, nor the pyramids in Egypt, Mexico and other countries around the World. Other key cities like New York, Paris, Brussels, Rome, Athens, Berlin, Montreal, Beijing, Bangkok, Tehran, New Delhi, Islamabad, Tel Aviv, Rio, Buenos Aires, Madrid, Pyong Yang, Seoul, Istanbul, Johannesburg and Kuala Lumpur were sealed off and would be dealt with soon. Other cities would then follow.
He wanted to remove all history of humans from the planet so a new era could begin; the dawn of the new Laakuu Empire. What remained of the dwindling human population would make useful slave labour.
3 Year’s Later
43
The three years following the Laakuu assault on Earth and its inhabitants had been incredibly hard for those ‘lucky’ enough to survive.
With all major cities destroyed and surrounded by forcefield walls, Kinaejah used what remaining pylons he had left to block off certain regions within key countries to prevent the movement of surviving humans who had yet to be killed or captured.
Kinaejah took perverse pleasure in separating Scotland and Wales fro
m England, and Northern Ireland from Eire.
In just a few hours, he also blocked off the USA from Mexico, successfully doing what the American President, Donald Trump, had been trying to do for years. He then cut off Panama from Columbia, effectively formalising a Central American region.
Kinaejah blocked off major harbours and other water courses, including the Suez Canal to separate Africa from the Middle East. Survivors in that region tried crossing the relatively narrow Gulf of Suez in boats until drones and Battlecruisers turned this into nothing more than a suicide mission.
He closed off the Strait of Gibraltar, the English Channel, the Sea of Marmara from the Black Sea and other former key shipping lanes.
Kinaejah was well aware that there were still millions of people in hiding, but he didn’t have the resources or capability to cover every square inch of just one small country, never mind the entire planet, so he had no option but to prioritise his aims and be selective.
He didn’t much care what was going on in the Southern hemisphere at all; it was a huge area and he had little to gain from it, so he left it relatively unscathed. The survivors in those countries were in chaos in any case, so he was more than happy to let them fight amongst each other. If he needed more slaves, it would simply be a quick shuttle ride to pick some more up.
So, he set a latitude line of 30º North as his cut off point, effectively a line from Houston in the US to Cairo in Egypt to Shanghai in China. Everything to the South of this invisible line was ignored for the time being, but of course, he would get around to this part of the planet eventually.
Kinaejah earmarked one of the new Elders to be responsible for different areas of the planet, deciding that he would retain full oversight of the UK.
As part of the final phase, Phase 6, Kinaejah landed his first Stormtroopers in London a week or so after the initial invasion. With the forcefield walls in place and all bridges across the river destroyed, he focused on the North side of the Thames.