No, he thought, as he stepped onto the roof. This was for him.
Austin was burning. Wherever he looked, there was a fire, burning through the city. The sound of shooting had been bad inside, but outside it was worse, an endless cacophony. He saw a line of missiles fired somewhere from within the city, aimed at the aliens on the outskirts, only to see the missies explode in fight and their launch site explode a moment later. The defenders were being forced back into the city, cleared out building by building, while the aliens pushed closer to the apartment. Streaks of light fell from the heavens, picking off strongpoints one by one, shattering the defenders. Army, National Guard, police forces, militia… they were dying out there, dying to defend their city.
And the gun nut was out there too. Joshua would have liked to believe that he was just a poser, that he would take one look at the conflict and try to run, but he knew the man better than that. It bothered him, somehow, that he didn’t know the man’s name. Once, he would have enquired for his story, or his hot tips to an editor who could be induced to pay a few hundred dollars for them, but now… now he wanted to know for himself. The man would probably die out there, defending his city… and the least that Joshua could do was remember the man’s damned name.
Another wave of explosions shook the city and then, slowly, the fighting started to die away. Silence fell, gradually, as the defenders were either killed or surrendered. He wondered if the aliens would actually take prisoners — he could still hear the occasional gunshot — and if they did, how they would treat them. It didn’t matter so much, now; they held all of Austin in their hands. Or, he thought with a sudden burst of amusement, they held it in their tentacles instead. He still hadn’t seen a live alien.
He told them to surrender, he thought, suddenly. It was the only explanation he could think of for the sudden collapse of resistance, or at least most resistance. His city had been delivered into the hands of its enemies. They hadn’t taken the city building by building, which would at least have been understandable, but through treachery? Or was it simple pragmatism? I wonder how he intends to win re-election in the coming election?
The thought wasn’t that funny. There might not be another election.
* * *
“Son of a bitch!”
Captain Brent Roeder shrugged. They might have remained inside the house, rather than going out to join their fellow soldiers fighting to prevent the aliens from entering the city, but they had had access to some elements of MILNET. They hadn’t had any access to classified data, and much of what they could see was obviously outdated, but it was enough to provide a clear view of what was going on. For whatever reason, Governor Brogan had ordered the remaining defenders to surrender… and the aliens were taking control of the city.
See how you like that, you bastards, he thought. There were plenty of guns in Austin and not everyone would obey the Governor’s surrender order. They might wait for a few days, but sooner or later there would be an insurgency directed against the aliens, and probably the Governor himself and anyone else involved in the surrender. Brent had studied insurgency tactics himself and, despite his horror at the situation, was almost looking forward to having a chance to put what he’d learned to use.
Corporal Cody Fahy looked over from his position on the edge of the bed. “Sir, what are we going to do now?”
Brent smiled. They were, now, officially behind enemy lines. They didn’t know what the aliens would do with the remains of the human government, but they had to be counted as suspect, at least for the moment. If the aliens followed one set of human precedent, they would take their families as hostages and force their unwilling cooperation, or they would round them all up and try to govern the city for themselves. They might shoot all of their prisoners at once, or they might press them into service to help them maintaining order, or they might simply imprison them a long way from help. So much depended on how the aliens treated the city that had suddenly fallen into their hands.
It wasn’t going to be easy. The men and women of SF34 knew the city like the back of their hands, and the aliens would be operating in completely unfamiliar territory, but that wouldn’t last. They’d probably be patrolling the city as heavily as possible — he wondered, briefly, just how many of them there were on the ground — and they’d use it as a chance to learn how the city worked. If they controlled the water, the power and the food… far too many people would have no choice, but to do as they wanted and damn the cost to their country.
But they had no choice.
“Well,” he said, finally, “we’re going to give them a few days to get settled down and relax a bit…”
He smiled at their expressions. “And then we’re going to make their lives hell…”
Chapter Fifteen
Do not ask what the Government can do for you. Ask why it doesn’t.
— Gerhard Kocher
The big situation map was updated constantly as elements of the tactical communications network were re-established, but no one was entirely sure just how accurate it was. A big swath of Texas was covered with the red glow of occupied territory, reaching from Houston in the east to San Angelo in the west and northwards as far as Fort Worth, but it couldn’t all be occupied by the aliens. They might control the entire territory in a grip of steel or they might have restricted themselves to the cities, fighting it out to take and hold them against human resistance. Countless military units, trying to make their way out of the trap and back to the human lines, were filtering through the area, while places like Fort Hood continued to resist the aliens. The entire situation was hopelessly confused.
Paul sighed as he checked the latest updates. The chaos in Texas was only the tip of the iceberg. The alien invasion, even if it had landed in Russia or darkest Africa, would have been disruptive enough, simply through the loss of all the satellites. The landings in Texas were starting to push the United States into chaos; sooner or later, they would have to evict the aliens… and even if they succeeded, what then? As long as the aliens controlled space, they could simply pound the planet into submission… and no one even knew why they were doing it. They clearly wanted Earth intact, or else they would have rendered the planet uninhabitable, but why? What did Earth have that was so attractive to them?
But that didn’t matter, not at the moment. The truth was that the United States Army was on the run, caught between the fires of the alien landings and their bombardment from orbit, exposing countless civilians to the wrath of their new masters. The aliens might treat their captives decently, or they might simply slaughter every human that they found; there was no way to know. In time, reports would filter in through the Internet of what was happening in the occupied territory, but the handful of reports they had were contradictory. He suspected that some of them were actually the product of wishful thinking.
He stood up and walked down the corridor towards the Situation Room. The Secret Service guard at the door checked his ID quickly and professionally — ignoring the fact that if the aliens had managed to create human duplicates, the war with probably hopeless anyway — and allowed him to enter the room. There was a new air of despair floating through the air as the cabinet took their places, a new sense that everything might just be hopeless, but Paul ignored it. They had to keep fighting, if only so they could get better terms…
Easy for me to think, he thought, coldly. He was in a bunker, safe and protected by an entire battalion of infantry… although they would be no protection if the aliens realised their location and dropped a KEW on their heads. He was safe… and millions of American citizens were not. The entire planet wasn’t safe. It was easy to talk of resistance, but how many would resist when their lives and families were under threat from the aliens? Human response to enemy occupation was often a random variable; it depended, too much, on how the occupiers acted and why. The French had been happy to remain quiet under the Germans, but the Russians, knowing that they would be thrown into the gas chambers eventually, had had no choice, b
ut to resist. What did the aliens have in mind for humanity?
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the President of the United States.”
The President looked tired, but there was a new strength in his eyes. The position of war leader wasn’t one that most American Presidents had to hold and few of them had really expected to hold it. There was a vast difference between a minor peacekeeping operation in Africa and the global war on terror, to say nothing of World War Two or an alien invasion. Paul wondered, cynically, if the President was contemplating his chances for re-election… if there would be another election. The aliens might render it all irrelevant.
“Please be seated,” the President said. He took his seat and peered around the table. “What the hell was Brogan thinking?”
There was a long uncomfortable pause. “I believe, from our brief telephone conversation, that he wanted to spare Austin further destruction,” Spencer said, finally. There was an uneasy tone in his voice. He had to know that his own position was exposed and vulnerable. “The aliens would have taken the city anyway, devastating it like Houston in the process, and…”
“And nothing,” the President said. “Why did he order the defenders to surrender? He shouldn’t have even been able to do that!”
“I don’t know, Mr President,” Spencer admitted. “The last report we had was that he’d gone to meet the aliens personally… and then we lost contact. The fighting was dying down anyway when he decided to… spare us further bloodshed.”
General Hastings coughed. “He may have sent several thousand of our people into a POW camp, if the aliens have POW camps,” he said. “I don’t think that all of our people will have accepted the surrender order — some of them actually made their way out of occupied territory to report to us — but enough did that the cities fell. Houston was devastated by heavy fighting; so far, reports indicate that the city was literally torn apart.”
The President ran his hand through his hair. “I know,” he said. Paul realised that he felt the weight of each death personally. “What exactly is going on in the occupied territories?”
“The aliens,” General Hastings said, nodding towards the main display. An image of a black-clad alien appeared in front of them. A moment later, it changed to reveal an eerie purple-red face, marching towards a target on the horizon. “They’re humanoid, which the scientists can’t explain, but they’re clearly alien. They don’t move like us.”
“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 ta
lking 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.”
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