“There’s also an ugly little rumour being passed around the bazaar,” Captain Harper said. “They were saying that a lot of refugees have been coming into the city, claiming that the aliens have driven them out of their homes and sent them into the desert to die.”
Carmichael blinked. “Fake, do you think?”
“Impossible to tell,” Captain Harper said. He shrugged. “Except there was a similar story being passed around the Internet from Texas, claiming that the aliens were depopulating entire towns, for no apparent reason. They just show up, order the people out, and take over. It could be an odd coincidence, but…”
* * *
There was no change in the noise of the city, no call to prayer echoing over the city, but the streets suddenly became empty as shoppers and civilians, most of them completely unemployed now since the government had collapsed, headed to their homes to pray. The aliens hadn’t twigged, openly, that any Muslim could lead prayers, although their experience with other sects in Texas would probably tip them off, sooner or later. Sergeant Sean Gartlan watched from his position as the civilians started to filter home, clearing the streets completely, apart from his small group.
He looked back at them now. They were all young, Arab, and determined to fight. They’d also been pains in the arse, and if he hadn’t needed them, he would have dumped them all or done the resistance a big favour by selling them out to the aliens. The aliens had crushed their semi-comfortable lives, and now they wanted to fight, but they needed training and experience. They had once followed mullahs and clerics who had promised bloody revolution and a change in the established order, but if nothing else, the massacre of the young religious students on the day that Riyadh fell had convinced them that the mullahs didn’t have the slightest idea of how to fight. Neither did they; Sean had tested them, several times, and had realised that they were more likely to be dangerous to each other than the enemy. Given time, and a proper training camp, they might have made soldiers, but without such luxuries, the best he could do was give them a quick course in urban combat and hope that they could take a few of the aliens with them.
“Remember,” he hissed, in Arabic. “Do not open fire until I give the word, or I’ll cut off your dicks, understand?”
The alien patrol was late, unsurprisingly. They’d learned after a few ambushes in Texas to keep their patrols on a varying schedule, just to make planning an ambush difficult. Sean had been careful to keep the young men from attacking until conditions were absolutely perfect, even though they wanted to attack as soon as they saw a hint of the alien presence, knowing that they would need all the advantages they could get. The aliens, if nothing else, would have passed through the area several times, unmolested. Like every other city they had occupied, Riyadh was now almost completely without moving human vehicles. There were a handful driven by collaborators, some of them formerly the possessions of princes who’d been killed, captured, or quick enough on their feet to flee, and one of them had been parked on the curb. The collaborator had been, apparently, a lousy driver… and the trunk had been packed with explosives.
A thin whistle echoed through the air from the lookout; the aliens were coming. Sean gripped his weapon in one hand and checked it, again, as he heard the strange noise of alien vehicles. A few weeks ago, the religious police would have been on the whistler and beaten him, but now… now, the young men could whistle all they liked. The aliens wouldn’t notice until it was too late. He saw them turning the corner, a handful of armoured fighting vehicles… and pushed hard down on the detonator. The IED exploded with colossal force.
“Now,” he barked, and opened fire, spraying bullets across the alien forms. The blast had been more powerful than he’d anticipated and the alien convoy had been dented, although the two armoured vehicles had survived. Their gun barrels traversed with frightening speed to bear on the insurgents, but two of the young men hurled satchel charges onto the vehicles and detonated them, caught in the blasts themselves. The handful of remaining aliens took cover with commendable speed and returned fire, but knew that they were trapped. Their only hope was to hold out long enough for help to arrive and, hopefully, wipe out the insurgents.
He waved across at Kalid, a young man who was slightly more responsible than the others, and gave the retreat signal. Five of the men obeyed at once and came running, while a series of detonators and firecrackers exploded high above, trying to convince the aliens that they were still under attack. Sound-wise, it would be as if an entire Company was attacking their positions, although the absence of bullets pinging off their armour would be a bit of a giveaway. The remaining men continued to fight, trying to get as many aliens killed as possible, but Sean knew that they would all die. He wanted to stay and fight himself, but they would just end up trapped; grimly, he led the retreat though the streets, heading for the safe house.
“We can’t leave them,” Kalid protested, as they ducked under cover. A flight of alien helicopters passed overhead with menacing speed. A moment later, he heard the scream of rockets as they pummelled hell out of the surrounding buildings, apparently still under the impression that the buildings were occupied by dangerous insurgents, firing down at trapped aliens. “Sir…”
“There’s no choice,” Sean snapped back. He missed the remainder of the platoon desperately at such times; he would have welcomed a Royal Marine or even a Paratrooper, rather than such poor raw material. The other lads were likely to get killed by the people they were meant to be training. “They knew the dangers and they knew what would happen if they disobeyed.”
He looked back as the sound of human weapons cut off abruptly. The Saudi culture, as far as he could tell, was a bizarre mixture of Islam, machismo and a superiority complex that dwarfed anything else he’d ever met. He could imagine what the idiots he’d left behind had thought — there was no reason why proper Saudi lads couldn’t do the job of the infidel and probably better — and, in doing so, they’d gotten themselves killed. He wouldn’t shed any tears over them, not now, even though he saw a hint of the young teenager he’d been in their eyes. They’d never had to learn the way the world worked until it had been far too late.
The walk back to the safe house was easier as the streets filled with people again. They might have realised that several of the insurgents were returning to their base, but Sean had taken the precaution of ordering his men to keep their weapons hidden, both from the humans and the aliens. A collaborator could be anyone, and, unlike Texas, the collaborators were more often genuine than not. He’d taken a more complex precaution as well — none of the boys, apart from Kalid, knew the location of the safe house, but they would have to be more careful in the next few weeks. The aliens might have taken prisoners… and everyone broke eventually. There were more horror stories than hard fact about the alien methods for interrogation, but no one doubted that they worked, although the cynical part of his mind suggested that it had more to do with hard cash than anything else.
“Check the traps,” he ordered, as they entered the house. The noise of alien helicopters was growing louder, but they didn’t seem to have picked up any scents, just buzzing around to see who reacted. He refused to be panicked by them. “Once that’s done, we’ll lay low for a few hours, understand?”
The house had once been owned by a wealthy man, although none of them knew who, and he had had an astonishing — and probably illegal — collection of DVDs, some of which were borderline pornographic. He also had a collection of drink, including some quite rare vintages, all of which Sean had poured down the sink. The young men would have tasted alcohol before, on trips to Bahrain and Europe, but the last thing he needed was for them to get drunk near weapons. That was asking for disaster.
“Not a bad days work,” he said, once they’d checked the traps and confirmed that they were undisturbed. The aliens would have gotten a surprise if they’d tried to burst in. “We might just make soldiers out of you yet.”
* * *
“They’re not happy,” Ca
ptain Harper reported, that evening. The Marine seemed more excited than normal, almost smiling. “It seems that several attacks were made against their forces in the city and they want answers.”
Carmichael smiled thinly. “And are they blaming the attacks on us?”
“Not yet, but they do have their suspicions,” Captain Harper said. “They might not want to disturb the embassies, but I think it’s going to be harder to move around now. Hell, we don’t even know why they let us stay here…”
Carmichael had been giving the matter some thought. There seemed to be no logical reason for it, but the aliens had actually treated them as a semi-official delegation, although they seemed unwilling to say so out loud. “They don’t have an embassy in… America,” he said. He’d been about to say Washington, but that was too painful for words. “Or anywhere else, for that matter, unless they have one in Russia and the Russians haven’t told us. Perhaps they want to have some way of communicating officially with us…”
He broke off as a dull rumble echoed over the city. “Are we under attack?”
“No, that’s coming from further away,” Captain Harper said. He tilted his head for a second as the rumbling grew louder. The entire building, as large as it was, was shaking slightly under the pressure. “I think… I think we’d better get up to the roof.”
He led the run up the stairs and onto the roof. The sky was alight, not with the strange twinkling of the first battles in space, but with a thousand glowing engines. He thought of fireflies, hanging in the sky, but these were falling down towards the south. It wasn’t like the first invasion, or other alien activities, but something else…
Captain Harper put it into words. “My god,” he breathed. “They’re landing their population! We’ll never get rid of them now!”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Imperialism is the growth of one self at the cost of another.
— Jacob Davies
“Are you sure that this is a good idea?”
“Nup,” Brent said, happily, as he mounted his bike. “You do know all the dangers, don’t you?”
Joshua gave him what was supposed to be a reproving look, although he suspected that after having faced flying bullets, it wasn’t that terrifying. “Yes,” he said. Brent had spelled them all out in precise detail. “Are you sure that this is a good idea?”
“It has to be done,” Brent said, dryly. “You’re the only other person I can take with me, so… you’re coming. Besides, you can write about it for your blog.”
Joshua said nothing. The ID cards they both carried, to say nothing of their relative freedom to move around the city and even outside it, marked them as first-rate collaborators. The aliens might not be a danger to them, unless they had brought in some new security checks or even some of their own ID card technology, but there was a fair chance that some insurgent would take a shot at them, convinced that they were alien collaborators. Brent had wondered about some kind of general notice to the rest of the insurgents, but by now the aliens would have collaborators monitoring the blogs, just watching for intelligence they could use. Joshua had even helped to make them look unreliable; if half the attacks threatened on the Internet had come to pass, the entire alien force would have been exterminated several times over.
The three weeks he’d spent with the soldiers, once he’d come to an uneasy truce, had been the most exciting and the most boring of his life. Exciting because he never knew when the aliens caught on to the safe house and burst in, boring because he couldn’t go out on the streets, even for a short time. The aliens might not have a positive ID on the soldiers, but they certainly knew who Joshua was and had even hung up wanted posters, offering a reward for his capture. They hadn’t said ‘dead or alive,’ but that had been the impression Joshua had gotten… and so he hadn’t wanted to wander. Instead, he’d taken his blog back and updated it with heroic stories about the insurgents, although Brent had insisted on reading everything first, just in case. The result was a series of exciting stories that were rather vague.
And then the aliens had started to land several miles away from the city, to the west. Joshua had watched the massive shapes moving down in the darkness, their drives turning night into day, and wondered what they were doing. The aliens seemed to have clamped down harder on the city as the landings began, running far more patrols and checking everyone for signs of insurgency, leaving only their collaborators with any real freedom. Brent had spoken to one of his best sources, a former lawyer who’d signed up as a collaborator while working for the resistance, and obtained two ID cards. If they worked, they could get out of the city, if only for a short period of time, and find out what the aliens were doing.
“Fine,” he said, finally. He suspected that one of the reasons that Brent had brought him alone was because he needed support, but he didn’t have any soldier he cared to risk, not when they would be needed in Austin. Joshua was expendable. “Let’s get on with it before I have an attack of brains to the head and realise how dangerous this is.”
Brent swung himself onto the bike and peddled off, Joshua following him a little more uncertainly. It had been years since he’d ridden a bicycle, but it was all coming back to him, if only because he was glad to be out in the fresh air. The smell of vehicles had faded, to be replaced by an ever-present smell of smoke and burning, caused by the fighting. Large parts of the city were destroyed and, for some reason, the aliens hadn’t even started rebuilding them. He saw, out of the corner of his eye, an alien patrol, but ignored them… and was ignored in turn. If they were caught, it wouldn’t be right next to the safe house.
The city’s populations had gone back to bikes in a big way. The aliens didn’t seem to care about people riding bikes, although they tended to stop anyone carrying a large bag, and so everyone was peddling around the city. Brent, Joshua had to admit, had been right; the two of them just blended into everyone else. There was nothing to mark them out as wanted fugitives, not until they reached the checkpoint at the edge of the city. The aliens didn’t let just anyone out, although the internet was buzzing with some odd reports of moments of alien kindness, of all things, and if they were caught…
I could die here, he realised, suddenly. The city had seemed darker and darker as they’d ridden towards the checkpoint. Away from the remainder of the cyclists, it was easier for them to be marked as collaborators and the dirty looks… he was lucky that no one had thrown a stone at them. Brent might have managed to stay on his bike — if he was to be believed, he had managed to cross a river under fire from both sides — but Joshua had no such illusions about himself. A single stone would have pitched him off his bike and into the tender mercies of the aliens or another resistance cell. The aliens, watching them dispassionately, would be delighted to get their hands on him.
The alien checkpoint was simple enough, but Brent had taught him enough for Joshua to pick out the hidden and well-protected machine gun nests, held well back from the road. The resistance had once driven an explosive-laden truck into one of the checkpoints, blowing it up along with all of the guards, and since then the aliens had been rather more careful. They might not be afraid of a pair of cyclists, particularly ones with such good papers, but they wouldn’t take them for granted either.
“Papers,” the lead alien said. As always, there was no way of seeing the alien face behind the mask, or anything to mark him out as the leader. Brent had bemoaned that in one of their brief discussions; standard sniper practice was to pick off the leaders first and it wasn’t easy to identify an alien leader. They didn’t salute or genuflect to each other. “You will present your papers now.”
Joshua was suddenly very aware that they were trapped. “Here,” he said, passing over his ID card. He couldn’t stop his hands from shaking, so he returned them to the bike handles and squeezed them hard. The collaborator looked enough like Joshua that a little make-up could allow them to pass for one another, but he wouldn’t have been so scared when facing the aliens, not unless his cover was blown.
Brent seemed utterly untroubled by the guns pointed at them, while Joshua needed to go to the toilet urgently.
“You may proceed,” the alien said finally, as the gate opened. Joshua almost forgot to recover his ID card before pushing down on the pedals and biking madly out of the city. It was an illusion, but as he breathed in his first breath, he was almost sure that he tasted freedom in the air.
“Not too bad,” Brent said, when they were away from the city. From a distance, Austin looked almost normal, although parts of the skyline had been remodelled by the aliens, with several missing buildings. He could almost believe that the aliens had vanished and the human race was still alone in the universe. Only the complete absence of any moving vehicles and the devastation all around them spoiled the illusion. “You could have handled that worse.”
Joshua glared at him. “I could have handled that worse?”
“Oh, of course,” Brent assured him. “Do you think that a good soldier is automatically a good Special Forces dude?”
“I have honestly never given it much thought,” Joshua said, tightly. He had the shakes badly now and pulled over to calm himself. “What makes you so special?”
“You have to be more than just the best, you have to be willing to play a role, or even to bend the rules,” Brent said, seriously. “Most soldiers are honest people; they won’t lie or even consider lying, particularly in a combat zone. I have worn enemy uniforms and been in places where an American soldier might have shot me. I could have been shot by someone on the same side! You need a special mindset for that and most soldiers don’t have it.”
Invasion Page 36