Across the road, there were pine trees, lots of pine trees, and then flat fields, a glimpse of the river. It was a nice sunny day. Except for the pillars of smoke coming from town, from the smoldering potato warehouse, and the burned-out alien ship. And except for the other alien ship now climbing back into the sky, it zoomed up to a thousand feet and hovered. "Yup," I said, "they found that alien stuff we threw out of the truck, and dropped off some guys to check it out. That ship up there is providing close air support to the guys on the ground. Tom, there's," I counted on my fingers, "six, no, seven, houses between here and where they are?"
"Ten," Tom corrected me, "you didn't include the McDonald and Burgess places, back off the road. And the old gas station fruit stand that's been abandoned for twenty years. That's ten places, with multiple structures like barns and garages. They'll be thorough searching each one, right, and that takes time."
I bit my lip, which is a thing I did when I was thinking. "The alien commander up there has no idea where we took his soldier." What would I do, in his situation? "We could be in any house or barn around here, we could be in a cave in the woods, we could be ten miles down the road. He has no idea." Unless our captive had some sort of transmitter that could be detected even from the bomb shelter. They did, after all, have technology to travel between stars. I tapped my chin, that's another thing I did then I was thinking. "They only sent one ship. If this was a search and rescue mission, they would have sent several ships. This guy started down from orbit before we grabbed fuzzy face, he only planned to pick up hamsters from the first ship."
"What does that mean?" Susie asked.
"It means the next five minutes will tell us what their orders are. If that ship recovers the guys on the ground and flies away, then they're sticking to their original mission plan, and they'll handle search and rescue later. If that ship hangs around, then they've scrubbed the original plan, and they're waiting for reinforcements to sweep the area."
"That's what you'd do?" Susie asked.
"That's what we'd do, the Army."
The alien ship descended again, then climbed and resumed hovering, closer to us. "Damn it! It's Option B. He just dropped off more guys to start searching buildings." I saw Susie check her rifle again. "Susie, forget about any cowboy Alamo last stand shit. All we've got is three rifles, a shotgun and two pistols. If they get close, we head east through the woods. The missiles on that ship could kill all of us from ten thousand feet."
"We're going to give up?"
"We're not giving up, we're being realistic." I couldn't believe I was arguing with Susie about this. "We can't use the ice cream truck again, it's too distinctive, and that alien ship is too close."
"Fine!" Susie shot back. "We wrap our Fuzzy Face in lead blankets, and carry him into the woods here. It's only a mile to the river from here, we can-"
"Hey!" Deb shouted. "The sky! More lights!" We looked up to see the morning sky twinkling again. There were a lot of lights up there. "Oh, damn it. They're bringing in more ships?" Deb asked. "That can't be- WHOA!"
We looked away, spots swimming in our eyes from a searingly bright explosion in the sky right above us. I blinked, staring at the ground, my shadow flickering as more explosions lit up the sky.
"Yeah!" Stan pumped his fist. "We're hitting back! Nuke the bastards!"
"No way." I shook my head. "Our nukes don't have seeker warheads, they can only hit a preprogrammed targets, on the ground." Unless the Air Force had some amazing toys I didn't know about. There were still spots in my eyes, I shielded my eyes and looked toward the horizon. More explosions in the sky, farther away. "That's not us." Was that an EMP blast, the aliens setting off a nuke high in the sky, to knock out our electronics? We didn't know it then, but the second set of lights in the sky was a Kristang battlegroup jumping into orbit, then attacking the Ruhar.
"Then who is it?" Tom asked.
"Hey, look!" Debbie pointed up the road. The alien ship that was tracking our captive was descending again, fast. It was on the ground only a few minutes before taking off again, and this time, it stood on its tail and went straight up, fast. We heard a sonic boom, and it left a contrail behind. Wherever it was going, it was in a hurry. "Whatever is going on up there, that ship just got new orders. Let's get Fuzzy Face in the truck again, and bring him to the National Guard armory, before they come back."
"Then what?" Tom asked, as we scrambled down the trail, all of us glancing at the sky. We needed to get Fuzzy Face away from the area, before the aliens changed their minds again.
"Then, I see what my orders are." If I couldn't contact the 10th Division, I'd hook up with a local National Guard or Reserve unit for now. "And we survive. I have a feeling Margie's warehouse of canned goods is going to be more important that these guns, with winter coming on."
CHAPTER TWO DEPLOYMENT
Late the following Spring, I was in Ecuador, about to be shipped off-world, to fight hamsters in outer space. Ain’t that a kick in the ass. I was surprised how cool it was in the mountains of Ecuador, my mental images of South America always involved suffocating heat, like I'd experienced in Nigeria. It had been a cold winter in Maine, not cold in terms of temperatures and snow, which was about average for recent years. Cold in terms of, no electricity for a long time, and gasoline and heating oil in short supply. My hometown, and my folks, were better equipped for the winter than many others across the country; my parents had a wood stove in the house, and another out in the garage/workshop. A family from down state, who'd been frozen out of their apartment building, came to live in the garage after Christmas, my father bartered repairing a tractor engine for bales of straw that we packed into the garage walls as insulation, covered by canvas tarps. I visited my parents a couple times, the garage was cozy and warm, and smelled like new-mown hay. There was another family of three, plus a single woman, living in my parents' house, as part of a government resettlement program.
Everyone was on their best behavior, all winter.
The state and federal governments in the US had a rough start dealing with the crisis after the Ruhar attack, fumbling around uselessly, then they got their acts together and focused simply on getting people through the winter. The Ruhar attack hadn't been what we expected from watching sci fi movies, instead of hitting military bases and major population centers, they had mostly destroyed electric power plants and industrial facilities. It was weird, I saw satellite pictures of New York and DC after the attack, and other than lack of lights and traffic on the roads, the cities weren't touched. After the Kristang kicked the Ruhar out of our solar system, the US of A didn’t have much working electric-powered infrastructure left. Phones and the internet were down, electricity was spotty if you got power at all, the radio only broadcast emergency messages a couple times a day, TV stations and cable were out. The Navy brought nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers into port in major coastal cities, and hooked them up as floating power plants to provide electricity to critical facilities like hospitals. We were slowly regaining electric power across the country, the key word being slowly. When I left for Ecuador, my parents still didn't have power, other than the generator my father hooked up from the tractor's power takeoff. He ran the tractor on a 50/50 mix of alcohol and gasoline, with the alcohol home-brewed. The alcohol ate up seals in the engine, so my father and the guy living in the garage replaced the seals every month. They only ran the electricity in early mornings and evenings, anyway, there wasn't fuel available for much more.
The biggest problem facing America wasn't lack of electricity, it was the economic crash that followed the attack. My father lost his job when the paper mill shut down. Loggers didn't have enough gasoline to run their trucks or even their chainsaws. Without wood pulp, the mill couldn't produce paper. The market for paper had collapsed anyway along with the rest of the global economy. Industrial nations like the US, Japan, China and across Europe were hurt much harder than lower-tech areas of the planet, which was ironic. The greater the level of a nation's techno
logy, the worse it was hit by the crisis. The value of technology companies went straight into the toilet, and not just due to lack of demand from the overall economy. Who wanted to invest in Silicon Valley, when our new allies the Kristang were going to share incredibly advanced technology with us?
Except they didn't. The Kristang said we weren't ready, that we couldn't be trusted with their level of technology, and that we needed to focus on rebuilding our current infrastructure. Really, our new allies were a disappointment, other than chasing the Ruhar away. The bulk of the Kristang battlegroup jumped away within a week after defeating the Ruhar, because Earth didn’t have space docks or warship servicing facilities, or pretty much anything else the Kristang needed. They didn’t fight the Ruhar for the benefit of humanity, they fought to deny the Ruhar a base in our little corner of the galaxy. Earth was Guadalcanal in WWII, that’s how one of the National Guard officers described it. Neither side cared about the place, except as a steppingstone to somewhere more important. The US and the Japanese hadn’t cared about the island of Guadalcanal or the natives living there, all either side had wanted was to use that island as a base to push on to the next conquest. The Kristang and the Ruhar felt the same way about Earth. Being American, the world’s only superpower, strongest military force in history, it was hard to think of ourselves in the role of the native primitives, watching the Kristang and Ruhar forces do battle over our land, with weapons we could barely comprehend.
“Hey! Bishop! Hey!”
I spun around, disoriented, to find my self face to face with a guy from my fireteam, a guy I never thought I’d see again. “Cornpone!” I shouted.
“Brown bread!” He responded, and we hugged and pounded each other on the back so hard it knocked the wind out of me. Jesse Colter, from Arkansas and a proud son of the South, which is what he’d told me when I first met him in basic training. I called him ‘cornpone’ because that was, I think, something people ate in the South. ‘Brown bread’ was his retort, referring to a molasses-sweetened raisin-filled bread in a can that is a New England tradition. I had served him a slice once; some people heat it in the can in hot water, but I prefer to toast each slice. You cut off both ends of the can, and push the bread out, with the rings from the can visible on the bread.
I know. Trust me, it’s delicious.
“Or should I call you Barney now?" Jesse laughed.
Shit. The story had gotten around, I'd been teased all winter by the National Guard guys I was with. 'Barney and the Smurfs' is what people were calling me and the gang who captured the alien soldier. "Oh, man, does everyone know about that now?"
"With the internet kinda back up, the whole planet knows about it. Damn, man, good to see you!” Jesse said. “There’s a few of the 10th here, but nobody else from our squad yet.”
“You’re the first person from the 10th I’ve seen.” I admitted, looking around for other familiar faces.
“How’d you get here?” Jesse asked, as he bent down to pick up the duffel bag he’d been carrying before he saw me.
“After Columbus Day, I was going to try to get back to Drum, but nobody had enough gas to make the trip. So, I hooked up with the local National Guard, asked if they knew what was going on. The Guard colonel commandeered me, they’d been Federalized anyway. I figured what the hell, they gave me a rifle, a helmet and food, right?" Orders officially assigning me to the Guard came by shortwave radio later. "So, I played soldier in Maine, helped harvest crops, guarded fuel and food convoys. Then I got the call to come here, so I hopped a train to Boston.” A freight train. Riding in a converted old boxcar, I'd felt like a hobo, even though I'd had a ticket from the US government.
“No, what I meant was, how’d y’all get here? You fly?”
“Oh, yeah, uh, they put us on a troop train from Boston, it took us five days to get to Miami. We flew in about two hours ago.” We'd flown on a United 767 that had seen better days.
Jesse nodded. “I took a train to Dallas, and sat around there three days waiting for a flight, the damn Air Force couldn’t scrape enough fuel together to gas up the plane. I hear some units are coming on ships, from New Orleans and Houston.”
“You seen this tower thing?”
“The elevator? Just what you can see from here. I don’t know about this, compadre.”
We looked up the mountain, the summit was barely visible under an overcast sky. Shooting straight up from the top of the mountain was a ribbon of white light. When the UN agreed to provide troops to fight under Kristang command, the Kristang had constructed what they called a space elevator, built it in less than a month. They chose this mountain in Ecuador, because it straddled the equator. On top of the mountain, the Kristang had constructed a base station with a fusion reactor, and thousands of miles above was a station in geosynchronous orbit. What connected the two stations was a thin magnetic field, basically a stationary lightning bolt. We were supposed to go into orbit on an elevator car that rode the lightning bolt. One of the Air Force guys on my flight said he’d heard the Kristang sent pulses up the magnetic field, and the elevator car was pushed along by the pulse. This elevator in Ecuador was the first to be finished, the Kristang were talking about building two others, one in Africa and the other somewhere in Indonesia. I squinted and shaded my eyes with my hand, examining the thin beam of light. “I don’t know about this either, man. One thing I do know is if the Kristang can do this, I’m glad they’re on our side.”
“I hear that, amigo.” Jesse agreed.
Looking up at the sky, at the lighting bolt I’d be riding into orbit, I wondered what had happened to Fuzzy Face. We’d driven south in our ice cream truck, until we ran into a state police roadblock, and when the cops saw who was in the back of the truck, we’d been given an escort down to Lincoln, where a National Guard helicopter took Fuzzy Face away. After that, any information about him was classified, and I’d been discouraged from talking, or asking, about him. Wherever he was, I hoped we was being treated well.
A buzzing sound caught out attention, we both turned to watch a group of grey-painted tiltrotor aircraft, flying in formation and coming in from the west. As they approached, the lead planes slowed and swung their propellers up into hover mode, descending like helicopters. Before I could ask, Jesse volunteered “The Navy has two carrier groups off shore, the Lincoln and the Reagan. I met some of the Marines around here this morning.”
“They coming with us?” Two carrier battlegroups would have sounded impressive, before the Ruhar attacked. Compared to alien militaries that could lift people into space on a lightning bolt, our nuclear-powered carriers were obsolete row boats.
“Some Marines units are, but these guys? Nah, they’re here to provide security for the elevator.”
I’d heard on the radio that the Kristang left security of the space elevator in Ecuador to the USA. I laughed. “Bet they’re happy about that.” No red-blooded US Marine wanted to be stuck on guard duty, while the Army went off into space to avenge the attack on our planet.
“Fuckin-A, man. They offered me big bucks for this patch.” Jesse fingered the blue UNEF patch on his right sleeve, the logo of the United Nations Expeditionary Force, which is what they were calling us now. National patches, in our case the US flag, went on the left sleeve. “Like money means anything now.” Jesse frowned and looked down at his clothes. “At least those Marines have real uniforms on. I got this at a surplus store in Arkansas.” His pants fit, while his top looked to be three sizes too big.
My own ‘uniform’ was mismatched, the pants were from the Maine National Guard, while the top, which had been issued to me on the train to Miami, was in an old camo pattern, and looked like it had been in storage since the Iraq war, the first one. Or maybe the Spanish-American War. It still smelled faintly of mothballs. “Maybe the Army will issue us new unis here.”
“Don’t count on it.” A familiar voice barked at us. We turned to see Lt. Amos Gonzalez, who had been a platoon leader in the 10th. Not our platoon, but a familiar fa
ce. Jesse and I snapped to attention and saluted. “At ease, men. Bishop and Colter, right?” His face broke into a grin. “It’s good to see the two of you. Glad you made it to the party.”
“Good to see you, too, LT." Jesse said. "Do you know how many of us are here?”
He shook his head, eyes down, as he kicked the dirt with his boot. “Communications are still spotty. We’re putting people to work as they straggle in.”
Jesse frowned at Gonzalez avoiding the question. “Hey, LT, all I’ve seen here so far is us, guys from the Belching Buzzards," he meant the 101st Airborne Screaming Eagles, "the 3rd Infantry, and Marines. We’re not bringing any armor or cavalry?”
Lt. Gonzalez shot him a scornful look. “Colter, you really want to be in a tank, fighting against an enemy that can shoot down from orbit?” He didn’t wait for Cornpone's answer. "That's a quick ticket to a long dirt nap. The Kristang said they needed infantry, so that’s what we’re sending. The armor and aviation boys are going to sit this one out.”
“Pardon me, sir, but what the hell good is infantry going to do against the Ruhar?” I asked. “I don’t even have a weapon.”
Gonzalez nodded sympathetically. “The Kristang won’t allow weapons on the elevator. We’re supposed to get weapons, body armor and everything else we’ll need, when we get to wherever we’re going. Personally, I like my old M4, but I don’t want to go up against the Ruhar with it.”
“We’re serving with Marines, sir?” I asked.
“A Marine brigade, yes. And, I hear, Brits, French, Chinese, maybe some Russians and Indian army also. You men checked in yet?”
“No, sir, I just got off the bus from the airport.” I said. I could still feel the steel slats of the bus seat on my butt. We had come from the airport, and climbed the rough, newly-cut road, in a convoy of garishly-painted old schoolbuses that were probably the finest transportation this part of Ecuador had to offer, before the Ruhar attacked.
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